Sounding Plumbline

A Month in the Old Republic

2012-01-19T22:33:00.024-05:00

So, it's literally been a month since Star Wars: The Old Republic (TOR) released, and as I've mentioned before, my World of Warcraft guild had decided to switch en masse. In fact, my friends and I were among the many who pre-ordered and got 3 or 4 days of early access to the game. (This, by the way, was a brilliant move by BioWare. By staggering invites, with pre-orders gaining access in groups throughout the week before the official launch date, it provided a way for the servers to "ramp-up" operations, and not only gave those of us who'd been eagerly waiting for the release a little reward of "getting in early," it also meant that we early birds could level characters out of the starting zones before the onslaught of the release day and prevent the scourge of all MMO gamers: server lag.) Now that we've spent a month there, it's pretty obvious TOR is going to be our game of choice for quite a while.

If you've read my previous post on the backstory for my main character, you'll know that we're on a role-playing (RP) server, in the Sith faction, and I'm playing an Inquisitor named Raymus Qel-Davro, an exiled cousin of the prince of Alderaan, who developed Force abilities unexpectedly and is on a quest for personal power, with a secret in his past concerning why he's connected to the Force at all, and a private vendetta against Alderaan's royal house. It's been interesting to be on a RP server because, during most of the few week or two of the release, no one was really behaving or talking in character, among my guild or in the general population. We were all just trying to get used to the game and figure out how it worked, which wasn't difficult (especially for those of us coming from other MMO experiences) but it was also pretty nice to see a general attitude of helpfulness on our server. Someone would ask a question in general chat about where to find a specific quest, or how to change a certain game setting, and immediately there'd be various people chiming in on an answer. For various quests, two or more players are needed, and for heroic quests (which are repeatable daily), four players are required. Four players are also required for "flashpoints," the TOR version of instances or dungeons. General chat was and continues to be rife with "LFG" or "LFM" (looking for group or looking for more) and the name of a quest or flashpoint, and people are very interested in grouping up so all of them can benefit from the extra xp and credits (in-game money) that a heroic quest or flashpoint gives. Gradually, more and more people are beginning to talk and behave as their characters, and so far, my guild has tended to do so more often when we're in a flashpoint together or when we're writing letters to each other to give items our character can't use but theirs can. When we're just on the game at the same time but doing our own individual storylines and quests we're more inclined to chat as ourselves, catching up on each others' lives and sharing ideas and opinions about the game, which has always been a central component of why the guild exists.

Rather than give as complete an overview as I did with World of Warcraft way back when, I think I'll give a brief overall introduction to TOR gameplay, perhaps point out a few major differences from WoW, and talk about why we are so impressed with it. So, like most MMOs, you choose the kind of server you're interested in: the standard player-versus-environment (PvE), player-versus-player, where opposite faction characters can attack each other on sight (PvP), standard role-playing (RP), and role-playing with player-versus-player (RP-PvP). The two factions, the Galactic Republic and the Sith Empire, each have four classes to choose a character from, and half a dozen races. However, unline WoW, the race of your character is purely a personal choice; no special stats are given to the various races, so there's no "better" races if you wanted a character who could do X ability or have Y automatic skill. Everything in TOR is focused on classes. The Republic has Jedi Knight (think Luke Skywalker), Jedi Consular (think Obi-Wan in episode 4), Smuggler (think Han Solo), and Trooper (think of, um, good-guy Stormtroopers, I guess). The Empire has Sith Warrior (think Darth Vader), Sith Inquisitor (think Emperor Palpatine), Imperial Agent (think of a trained sniper-assassin type), and Bounty Hunter (think Boba Fett). The classes are, as you might notice, loosely paired across factions in the order I've mentioned them. At level 10, each character is required to choose a specialization, and each class has two specializations. This allows for more unique characters and play, and also opens up more options for roles in groups. (Currently you can level to 50, so for most of the game you play as your specialization.)

As you may remember, in group quests or in flashpoints, there are three main "roles" players have in MMOs. The first is the tank, the leader of the group, who jumps in and starts bashing enemies, with the goal of doing as much damage as possible and the enemy focusing as much of their own firepower as possible on the tank. The second is the healer, who ideally stands back from most of the action, perhaps entirely, and focuses on healing the rest of the group, especially the tank. The third role is DPS, or damage-per-second. These are players who are part of the fighting but are the second-line of sorts, and tend to deal damage to the enemy in ways that require more time to effect, or require them to not be hit in order to keep the damage going over time. Tanks usually have melee weapons, things you can hold in your hand (axes, swords, lightsabers, etc.); DPS usually have distance weapons like guns or crossbows, or have "spells" like shooting fireballs or Force lightning. DPS also can often have AOE or area-of-effect weapons, which deal damage within a circle to multiple enemies; sometimes healers can have their own version of AOE which heals multiple team members at once. Specializations in TOR mean that the number of classes branch from 4 per faction to 8.

How this works effectively involves the skill trees, another common trope in MMOs. Starting at level 10, each character is given a skill point with every level they attain. Each character has 3 skill trees, with one shared tree based on class and two others based on specialization. Adding points to trees opens up new abilities or increases effectiveness of abilities already gained. They're referred to as trees because each begins with a bottom layer you have put skill points into to "open up" the next layer, and so on. Even though two Inquisitors may be standing next to each other, they could have radically different skill trees and so be wearing different gear and using different kinds of offensive and defensive attacks in combat, even if they're the same specialization, but even more if they're different specializations. This goes a long way towards customizing the game play towards each person's preferences, and allows for lots of variety in group combat because of all the myraid combinations which could exist. The secret is, all TOR classes are, at baseline, DPS classes, which is the happy medium for solo questing. With specialization, each character can continue in the shared skill tree and continue being DPS, or with the other two skill trees, move towards more of a tank or healer role. And so each class could be a tank, or a healer, or a DPS. It's a real advancement over WoW, where most of the classes are more narrowly defined in group roles: a priest could kinda do DPS briefly but is mostly a healer; a warrior could kinda do DPS briefly but is mostly a tank; a mage could kinda do tanking briefly but is mostly a DPS.

The real nail in the coffin of TOR over WoW for me and my guild, however, is the emphasis on storyline in all aspects of TOR, especially in terms of class quests, and also how quests of any kind are begun and ended. BioWare has apparently re-used and updated an interaction engine they used in the game Mass Effect, in which a player can interact with an NPC (non-player character) and select responses via multiple choice. Sometimes the conversation will continue along similar lines no matter what response is chosen, but often different responses will lead the conversation in different directions. For TOR, there are certain conversations which, depending on your responses, will result in points which increase your standing with the Light side or Dark side of the Force, occasionally lead to fundamentally different relationships with certain NPCs (including but not limited to loyalty, disgust, being more or less helpful, and even romance), and rarely even determine which quest you're offered. Additionally, throughout TOR each player, depending on their class, is joined as they level up by various "companions" who aid in solo combat. Each companion has its own personality and depending on your responses to NPCs, will gain or lose "affection points" towards you. Lose too many, and they'll desert you or betray you.

Here's an example. This isn't a real example, but something I've made up in terms of how things can go in-game. Say you're playing a warrior who is looking for a secret research facility and you, personally in terms of how you're playing your character, see helping the poor and outcast as beneath you. You're offered a quest by a ragged-looking man to stop a local gang from terrorizing the transients in a section of the city. He promises you information he says is crucial to your search, so you're tempted to help. You're also offered a huge amount of credits to do it, and you happen to have a companion at the moment who by default tends to be excited by any job which promises a big payout (all companions have set-in-stone preferences in interactions). So saying no would satisfy your own concept of your character's personality, but you'd lose affection points from your companion, who wants the money. Saying no also might, concievably, cut you off from future quests this ragged man might offer. Let's say you say yes, grudgingly. Your companion is pleased and you gain 15 affection points. You go off to the section of the city the ragged guy tells you about and kill 12 thugs. (While you're there, a side quest opens up to short-circuit the gang's communications network, which is patched into the city's electrical grids. By shorting out 6 of their patches, you automatically gain some extra xp and credits.) You return to the ragged man and as you interact with him, he hands over the money, but doesn't actually have the information about the research facility he said he did. He also doesn't have any more quests for you. You're now given options to walk away, threaten to report him to the city authorities, or kill him on the spot. All options will give you Light side or Dark side points (and, in a small divergence from the rules of the Star Wars universe, you can have a Sith who is on the Light side of the Force, and Jedi who are on the Dark side. It's a sliding scale, which can make characters more interesting). But your character is pissed - you were offering grudging help in the first place, mainly to get the information. You kill him with your lightsaber and gain 50 Dark side points, as well as the credits promised and the xp from completing the quest. Your companion, focused on the money, doesn't really care about the guy one way or the other, so you don't gain or lose anything with him.

As you can guess, this multiple-choice interaction engine makes the game dependent on cutscenes and voice acting, which frankly introduces a degree of nuance and subtlety into the game which has simply never existed in any other MMO previously. The game is already in the Guiness Book of World Records for the most amount of voice acting in any video game ever. It helps make your character, your companions, and a few of the NPCs with whom you interact frequently more complex, more interesting, and approach slightly closer to being "real." Most importantly, the writers have put serious thought and energy into the class-specific quests. In fact, though regular open quests and flashpoints have specific storylines involved (and the flashpoints in particular have involved storylines) the most intricate and realistic involve class quests. From levels 1-10, each character has a class "Prologue," encompassing the beginning of their story on a starting planet (for example, Korriban, with its Sith Academy, for Inquisitors and Warriors; Hutta, under control of the Hutt cartel lords, for Smugglers and Bounty Hunters) up the point where, at level 10, each player is given their own ship and let loose in the galaxy. Different planets have different suggested levels, but what really guides players is a 3-act story structure, based on class, which sends you to the planets in specific order to accomplish overall missions and takes your character along an arc from levels 10-50.

Raymus is at level 28 and he's still in Act 1. He's an Assassin instead of a Sorcerer. My Prologue involved me making a name for myself at the Sith Academy, overcoming the prejudices of my trainer, a narrow-minded guy who preferred another recruit to myself, and by beating that other recruit, attracting the professional attention of Zash, a powerful Sith Lord who enlists me in helping her find various artifacts which once belonged to Tulak Hord, one of the most powerful ancient Sith masters. From Korriban I was taken to the Imperial Fleet, a hub for various things you can do (upgrading armor and weapons from vendors, engaging in PvP arenas similar to WoW's battlegrounds, most importantly getting your own ship) and then took my ship to Dromund Kaas, Balmorra, Nar Shaddaa, and currently, Tatooine, where on each planet, along with the various regular quests, flashpoints, and space combat missions which presented themselves, I've been in search of the various artifacts. On Dromund Kaas I had to not only discover an artifact in a buried temple, I had to defeat Darth Skotia, the Lord who owns the temple and its archaeological dig and who also has a vendetta against my new master, Lord Zash. On Balmorra, the artifact is located in a pit crawling with colicoids, giant venomous oversized bugs, so first I had to track down how to make an antidote to their venom before even attempting to access the pit. On Nar Shaddaa, another artifict is in the personal collection of Paladius, the leader of a cult with devoted, homicidal followers. I'm enlisted by a brother and sister who are trying to stop the cult and they convince me into developing a new cult, based around me as leader, to challenge Paladius's authority and, once his power is curtailed, I pursue him to take the artifact from him. (A completely divergent choice I could have made would have been to minister to the many sick people on the planet and build my reputation that way.) Now, on Tatooine, I'm temporarily in a tenuous partnership with a space pirate whose former first mate has another of these artifiacts. I want the artifiact; the pirate wants to kill his old mate. All that is still in process, and I'm only about 1/3 through Tatooine.

Each of these overall planetary class quests has multiple steps and side quests associated with them, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it appears. On Nar Shaddaa, for example, concerning this brother and sister I team up with: the brother is out for power and control for himself, and the sister is oddly taken with my character and keeps making these flirty comments. Oh, and have I mentioned yet that in between Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine I have a dream where a strangely armored Sith appears to me and warns me that Zash will betray and kill me once I collect all the artifacts she wants? But I don't know who this apparition is and whether or not they can be trusted. In other words, the highly engaging, well-mapped-out storylines for the class quests are largely character-driven, and the mechanic of the interaction engine makes it possible to experience these stories in a more immersive way than other MMOs have been able to do. It also means replay value, in creating alternate characters of other classes, means that even though the regular quests on each planet are the same, the class quests and arcs are each entirely different. And so if you want to play both Republic and Empire characters, that's 8 entirely different class arcs to work your way through. And if BioWare and LucasArts ever decide to add more content in the form of specialization-specific quests (it'd probably be quests within the context of the overall arcs), that's 16 different baseline character experiences to some potential degree.

My guild and I are very, very happy with the game. For myself, I'm probably playing it for some part of a majority of my evenings, sometimes for 20 minutes (to do a few space missions, maybe), sometimes for 3 hours between solo questing and running flashpoints with the other guild members. As usual, some in the guild are on the game much more often than I am, and a few are on the game less. Our enthusiasm is pretty constant, however, and though I haven't created an alt character yet, others in the guild have, and I look forward to doing so. (I'm thinking an Imperial Agent, though I don't have a strong backstory idea for him - or her - yet.) I'll also say, we're open to more guild members and we're all about making the experience as pleasant as we can. We're glad to help teach you how to play, and run flashpoints or quests with you, and we follow our #1 rule pretty closely: If you're having fun, play, and if you're not having fun, stop playing. Though we're enthusiastic, we're not obsessive (much) and are definitely not going to start yelling at each other when things go wrong. Just last night, three other guildies and myself had to tackle a flashpoint end-boss 6 times, three times to figure out how to beat him, once because I made a stupid mistake (I didn't get into the room far enough when the fight began and got locked out) and then two more tries to actually defeat him. Let me know if you're curious about what it would look like to join us. As my girlfriend would say, come over to the Dark Side - we have cookies!

Top 10 Books of 2011

2011-12-30T22:57:00.000-05:00

Of course you are wondering why it’s only a top 10 instead of a top 15 as in previous years. Well, dear reader, it seems that I tend to read less when I stop having annoying neighbors. It’s an unanticipated minor disaster. You see, back in the apartment, when the guy across the landing got into one of his manic furniture-moving moods, I knew I had to leave the place for a few hours. Likewise, when the girl downstairs would experiment with cooking, which often involved cabbage or overcooked soups or both, I knew I had to leave the place for a few hours. Since I was a 2-minute walk from the library, I’d grab whatever book I was reading and spend some time in a comfy chair in the quiet back sections of the building. Since getting my house, the random extra hours of reading have vanished and I haven’t been intentional about replacing them. So I’ve only read 30 books in 2011, and so a top 10 would be the top third of them, which is what I’ve decided to go with. The other interesting thing to note, as I look back over the full list, is that only half a dozen were books of poetry, far less than in previous years. I’m not sure where that came from, but I do think it’s probably correlative to my own output of poems dropping off throughout the past year to barely a dozen. Still, there were some really great books I got to read this year, so let’s get to the list.

title – author – year published

10 – Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian – 1969.
The Napoleonic Wars are not my period of history, nor are ships and sailing a particular interest. Which probably explains why, when I saw and loved the movie version of Master and Commander in 2004 and decided to read the original novel, it didn’t actually happen for seven years. The book is almost entirely different from the movie, which cherrypicked various events from half a dozen of the 20 novels in the series and made some serious changes to Captain Jack Aubrey. The movie presents he and Stephen Maturin as long-time friends just at the beginning of middle-age, whereas the novel starts with their first meeting as younger men just starting their careers. While Maturin’s character seems much as Paul Bettany played him, a grave and serious-minded scientist and doctor, Aubrey is best described as an ambitious, ballsy, impulsive man, very jolly and outgoing, not much for gravitas but a great one for speechifying, and oh yeah, a womanizer. In other words, an 18th Century version of James Kirk. Still, the interactions between Aubrey and Maturin are much of the draw of the novel, as is the very realized world O’Brian creates around them, which feels quite authentic and has all the naval technicalities and jargon rather perfect. The story is episodic, with the crew here chasing a foreign vessel to plunder, there in port getting refitted, and over there being chased by a larger, more powerful ship, culminating in the crew playing an indirect role in the Battle of Algiceras near the Rock of Gibraltar. I may or may not read further in the Aubrey-Maturin series, but I’m glad I finally got around to dipping my toe into O’Brian’s world, which is so unlike where I usually spend my time.

9 – McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon – Joseph Mitchell – 1943.
Joseph Mitchell wrote of my all-time favorite books, Joe Gould’s Secret, which was made into one of my all-time favorite movies. So I knew I had to visit other works of his, and this collection of long and short pieces for the New York World-Telegram and the New Yorker during the ’30s and early ’40s, provides much of the same human insight and distinct flavor for honest, straightforward reporting which characterized both his writing and himself. Always attracted to the more unstable denizens of the Big Apple, his subjects for portraiture include a bearded lady, the old ticket-taker at a run-down theater, the Gypsies he can find in the city, a homeless traveler who writes extravagant checks to those who help him, and a tribe of Native Americans who were tapped to build many of New York’s bridges because they’re completely unafraid of heights. For all the fascinating characters and strong writing, one of the most intriguing things about the book for me was how poorly Mitchell’s attitude has aged: there simply are no picaresque, charming bums anymore, if ever there were. Underneath it all I suspect Mitchell had a bit of Huck Finn in him, with the back part of his brain always tempted to light out for the territories, and since by the 1930s there was no more frontier (Alaska and Hawaii not yet on the horizon for the U.S.), he took to chronicling the outsiders, the mavericks, the law-avoiders and law-breakers of the city he loved.

8 – The Great Wheel – Paul Mariani – 1997.
The only poetry book of the half-dozen this year to end up on the top 10, Paul Mariani’s poems have appeared on my top lists before, in 2008 with Prime Mover. Here, he uses the familiar Shakespearean trope of the turning of the wheel of fortune to wrestle with the past, his own and collectively America’s as well, giving glimpses of how battles both won and lost resurface and need to be fought again in our private and public lives. At the same time, things we’ve lost come back to us, sometimes a good thing, sometimes not so good. Still, his touch in applying this symbolism is light, knowing that the starkness of the basic idea is enough to carry its own weight without much additional pressure: there are mundane things like round bar stools, naturalism like the sun at noon, to modern machines like the ferris wheel and the classical circles of heaven and hell from Dante.

7 – The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle – J. Glenn Gray – 1959.
Working at Bluebell I get the chance to run across syllabi from all kinds of classes, and this one came from a psychology course a friend was taking. Almost immediately after receiving a PhD in philosophy from Columbia in 1941, Gray was drafted and served in Italy as a counter-intelligence officer, later becoming a philosophy professor at Colorado College. A decade later he published this book, a penetrating, thoughtful mix of distilled interviews and the author’s own experiences, set up as a philosophical exploration of and against war. He explores, through revisiting his war diaries and diaries of other soldiers, what war does to the thought processes and emotions of a soldier, towards himself, towards his fellow troops, towards “the enemy,” towards his family, and towards death. It’s a fine line to walk, trying to balance such rough, sometimes scarring experiences with as objective and philosophical attitude as possible, but Gray does an admirable job much of the time, providing some real insight and real questions for any reader, even one like myself who has seen very few of the realities of war.

6 – A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh – 1934.
Waugh will show up again soon, so the entry for this novel will be brief. A modernist story by turns satirical, sympathetic, and philosophical (as if Waugh were reading Virginia Woolf and Thornton Wilder simultaneously), the novel shifts between tones and themes, the first part being mostly about the breakdown of an aristocratic couple’s marriage through the wife’s affair with a socially ambitious middle-class urbanite. Then the couple’s young son dies unexpectedly, which leads the wife to ask for a divorce. At first willing to grant it, the husband finds her family demanding a settlement so large he’d have to sell his ancestral home (a huge, decrepit stone house in the Gothic style) and so he refuses, instead running away from the problem by joining an expedition to Brazil. The novel’s third section stays with the husband and his ill-fated expedition, where he is eventually held hostage by an insane but polite colonialist, revered as a god/father by a local tribe, whose sole purpose for keeping the husband around is so the latter can read the works of Dickens to him each night. Ostensibly a rumination on the subtleties of savagery within civil society and the aristocracy in particular, the combination of a rather off-the-cuff plot with Waugh’s impeccably precise writing and snarky wit made this a simply fun carnival ride, not so much a roller-coaster as one of those contraptions which swings back and forth until it gains enough momentum to upend its passengers and make a 360 degree turn.

5 – The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards – Whit Stillman – 2000.
I’ve mentioned that in my spate of rewatching some movies this past summer, one which really grabbed me was Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco from 1998, and two years later, Stillman wrote a novelization of the movie, told from the perspective of one of the secondary characters and including some of the scenes which never made it into the screenplay, plus an epilogue reflecting on the characters from years later. Jimmy Steinway is an ad-man in New York in the early 1980s, dangerously close to losing to his job. One of the few reasons he’s kept on staff is because he can get clients into The Club, a 54-esque night spot with a line outside the door and the coolest new disco tunes on the dance floor inside. Though in some ways a stereotypical rich kid/yuppie, Jimmy is not without a degree of observational prowess and has perhaps more than his share of windy pop philosophy. He falls in with a small social group who circle around Alice and Charlotte, two newly minted Hampshire grads who work together at one of the old publishing houses as lowly manuscript readers. There’s Tom, a young environmental lawyer who collects Scrooge McDuck comics; Dan, who works with the girls and spouts socialist ideals but also cuts a mean rug; Holly, the girls’ third roommate who is very nice and very ditzy; Josh, a young criminal lawyer with some emotional demons; and Des, floor manager at The Club and serial womanizer, who feels it’s a caring gesture to break up with girls by pretending to discover that he’s actually gay so he doesn’t hurt their feelings by telling them they’re boring. The novel succeeds as the film succeeds, by painting a world of neurotic young adults trying to figure out love and work and music, but does so in a fresh way by making Jimmy the sole narrator and so events which I already saw dramatized in the film are given from a different perspective. Jimmy gets annoying at times, but that’s part of the charm, a very specifically Stillman sort of charm, which I admit takes a little getting used to.

4 – Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville – 1835 & 1840 – translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, 2000.
It’s a huge book, with a huge theme, written by a large-minded man who greatly admired the American Experiment and sought to detail its governmental successes and shortcomings. It took me over a month to get through (a very long time for me to read something), and that coincided with buying my house so it feels like it looms large alongside that other sizeable event. I think I’ll just direct you to my third homeownership post rather than rehash my thoughts here.

3 – Privilege – Ross Douthat – 2005.
It is very, very rare that a book comes along where I want to start a dialogue with the author. Largely that’s because with most of the books I read, the author is already dead – oh well. But among living authors it’s rare, and when I read Privilege, whose subtitle is “Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class,” I seriously considering writing Ross Douthat a long email in response to his first chapter, telling them there was no obligation to continue the conversation, but here were my thoughts, from the perspective of someone educated at an almost-Ivy who now works on staff there, and someone largely in agreement or sympathy with his experiences and opinions about the college experience. If he was interested, I’d respond to further chapters. This plan was in my head for maybe two months; then the house-buying preparations took over, and I never did it. Sitting here thinking about it, the interest is coming back to me. We’ll see. In any case, as you might guess, I felt an affinity with the book, a sense you get when you read something and say in your head “yes, that’s just how it is, and that’s what’s good about it and that’s what’s not.” The intrigues among students and student organizations, with administration, over issues great like religion and small like grades, the hazardous and yet obliquely rewarding social stepping-stones and alumni connections, the default huge ambitions and default huge entitlements, love and sex and whatever elite, neurotic college students do with each other (which is lots of neither), professors by turns fawning and dismissively arrogant, educational ideals conspicuous by their absence. What saves the book from being a raw screed is first, its bemused humor, and second, the reality that this was Douthat’s undergraduate life, not some collection of long-faced statistics or some old Boomer lamenting “kids these days.” His stories ring true because they did happen to him. Undoubtedly it also helps that Douthat and I, were we at the same school, would have overlapped each other for two years, so perhaps I’m kinda squarely in the book’s demographic.

2 – The Plague – Albert Camus – 1947 – translated by Stuart Gilbert, 1948.
Camus has been on my list to read for quite a while, and eventually at one point in the past year I grabbed literally the first book of his I saw on my shelf (not reading an author doesn’t mean I don’t have a half-dozen of their books laying about) and started reading. The Plague is a straightforward story of an infection isolating the Algerian city of Oran in the present-day, revolving around a handful of characters and their reactions as the city and its citizens slowly succumb to turns of disbelief, terror, lawlessness, resignation, and depression. Though Camus was never comfortable with the idea of existentialism, the term describes the novel well, as does “the absurd,” the philosophical sense of which Camus did much to describe and promote. Taking place over the course of a little less than a year, the story describes the epidemic from start to finish, mainly concerning itself with Dr. Bernard Rieux, who pleads with medical authorities to recognize the problem, then slaves away to work on a cure – and eventually to comfort the dying as he can – as the epidemic grows. A few others find themselves drawn to Rieux’s efforts, including a city clerk spending years on writing one perfect sentence, a secretive suicide survivor who flourishes during the plague, a faithful Jesuit priest, a visiting journalist who continually plans to escape from the quarantine to return to his young wife, and a traveler and political activist who doesn’t believe in God but wants to understand if it is possible to be a saint. It’s a powerful cast of characters with a powerful backdrop, not for the weak of mind or stomach. Often I would find myself stopping my reading deliberately to let things that were being said or done sink in over a day or two before going back to the book. More Camus will be in my future.

1 – Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – 1945.
Here’s our Evelyn again. (By the way, he’s a man and it’s pronounced eve’-linn.) Funny story with Brideshead. I was supposed to read it in college, during my sophomore fall. I had a newly hired English teacher for 20th Century Novel that semester, and like all newly hired English teachers, she was too ambitious with our syllabus, listing nine novels for twelve weeks, most of them thick and all of them complex. We read six and a half – poor Jean Rhys got some very incomplete treatment. Brideshead was to be the final novel and we just never got there, but I’d bought the book and intended to read it someday. It sat on my shelf for about 14 years but I read it this summer, oddly enough finishing the last chapters while sitting on a hillside before an Alison Krauss & Union Station concert (the concert’s setlist is written inside the back flap). Waugh’s prose is perhaps at the height of his powers, though less of the satire he was famous for in his earlier works remains, and what does is almost never overt, but rather a subtle, very dry humor which warms my insides like little else does.

Charles Ryder, a captain in the British Army during World War II, is sent with his regiment to occupy a sprawling English country house called Brideshead. He doesn’t tell his superiors he’s well-acquainted with the house and its former family, the Flytes. Most of the rest of the story takes place in flashback, starting with Ryder’s days at Oxford with Sebastian Flyte, a gregarious and dissolute young man who goes around with a teddy bear called Aloysius. Sebastian introduces Charles to others in the dissolute-and-wealthy set, and eventually brings him to Brideshead, hoping none of his family are there, as he doesn’t want Charles to meet them. Eventually Charles does: there’s delicate and kind Nanny Hawkins, pompous and bland older brother “Bridey,” smart but shrewish sister Julia, and younger sister Cordelia, a charming and naïve girl who, along with Bridey and their gently tyrannical mother, Lady Marchmain, are strict Roman Catholics. Lord Marchmain, who had converted because of his love for his wife, has since abandoned her and lives with a French noblewoman in Venice. As Charles is drawn further into the Flyte family, his relationship with Sebastian strains and eventually he leaves the circles of Brideshead. The book shifts to a number of years later, with Charles having made a minor reputation as a painter, unhappily married to a socially ambitious wife and distant from his young children, when events take him into contact with Flyte family again in surprising ways and again lead him to Brideshead.

It’s a novel which on the surface is one of manners, but from the perspective of an outsider, as the book’s narrator is Charles and stays in his perspective throughout. On a deeper level, Waugh is concerned with the nature of divine grace and its presence or absence in individual lives. There is the nostalgic glow of “old Oxford days” and the beauty of Italy, as well as the ennui of middle-aged life and the tumult of the gentle English countryside turned from pastoral estates and farmland to garrisoned army training zones and stockpiles. In a time of victory gardens and rationing, there is a quite visceral emphasis on food, its quantity and quality and the lush extravagance of being able to call for it and it appears, the easy elegance of dropping many pounds on a night filled with wine and champagne. And the ghastly morning which comes after. Being the Anglophile I am I found the story utterly fascinating, and Waugh’s expertise as a stylist and wordsmith is perhaps unsurpassed in modern English literature. After finishing the book I watched the 11-hour miniseries adaptation from ITV in 1981, which would have appeared on the yearly top 10 for TV except it’s not a TV show. The coincidence was highly amusing when I watched Downton Abbey a few months later; as I said in my review of that show, it’s gotten the highest ratings in Britain for a small-screen period drama since Brideshead in 1981.

Top 10 TV Shows of 2011

2011-12-21T16:54:00.006-05:00

It was a good year for TV. Full disclosure: I think every year is a good year for TV. Likely because I keep falling deeper into the rabbit hole of British television with its shorter seasons (technically called series, not seasons) I watched 38 seasons of various TV series this year. (For the sake of consistency I refer to all shows using the American words and definitions.) And yet, even with more British TV happening, I ended up delaying continuing to watch favorites like Hustle, Foyle's War, Yes Prime Minister, and Primeval. Meaning there's some new British shows on the radar. Plus, the big question on everyone's mind: since Mad Men ended up taking a year off, what show captured the #1 spot in its absence? Let's dive in and see. I got props on the links-to-performances thing from my Top Albums post, so we'll do the same here.

show & season - year originally broadcast - network - episodes & run time

10 - Happy Endings, season 1 - 2011 - ABC - 13 eps., ~22 min. each.
I'll be honest, the half-hour situation comedy format isn't my thing. I never got into Friends or Seinfeld. Cheers, Frasier, The Cosby Show, and Mad About You were fine enough, though I get bored with them after a few episodes. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Futurama are more interesting to me because of how animation can aid in farce, but the stories themselves are ho-hum. I do tend to sometimes like sitcoms which sit in the middle somewhere between a traditional sitcom and satire, like The Larry Sanders Show, sitcom and drama like Sports Night, or sitcoms with larger-than-life personalities like NewsRadio or The Big Bang Theory or 30 Rock. (And still on my list to watch someday are things like Modern Family, Arrested Development, Parks & Recreation, and Community.) It's just that usually it takes me an effort to commit to watching a season of a sitcom, whereas a drama, historical, or genre-oriented show is a very easy fit.

Happy Endings is something which I may need to create a new category for. It starts as a Friends rip-off, about six people who met in college and haven't gotten to know anyone else since even though they're now in their late 20s. When Alex leaves Dave at the altar, their collective, balanced group theatens to unravel, and by the end of the pilot there's an uneasy truce between Alex and Dave so their friends don't have to choose sides. After about 4 episodes that setup essentially evaporates as any kind of drama and the rest of the show is, strange as this may sound, all six characters figuring out how to be funny in the early 21st Century when you're in your 20s and are trying to grow up in a world that doesn't care if you do (and when you have strong temptations in yourself not to, either). How much should pop culture factor into humor? How much should the classically juvenile genres of sex and scat be involved? Where's crossing the line into mocking your friends or you ex-fiance, and where's crossing that line and being hilarious? When is a catchphrase or meme overused? When does blaming your parents grow stale? When do you get to be old enough to mock the next generation? None of the characters ever think about any of this, of course, but are constantly critiquing and evaluating their own and each others' jokes and retorts and they'll often go on tangents about it all. When being meta is taken as a generational trait, you simply get characters who live inside these questions, and Happy Endings is a sitcom slyly devoted to exploring the current definitions of comedy. Here's a nice 2-minute illustration. And for an ironically fitting final comment, I will note that I watched the entire season of the show through ABC's free iPad app.

9 - Corner Gas, season 1 - 2004 - CTV - 13 eps., ~22 min. each.
Friends from grad school, who actually are the opposite of me and watch lots of sitcoms, told me I must try this Canadian show written by and starring Brent Butt, who must have decided to become a comedian after he learned his last name. Since I humbly accept that Canadians are funnier than Americans though not overtly so, I gave it a shot and was pleasantly entertained, which is Canadian for it totally rocked, dude. Very much a straight-up situation comedy in the wacky personalities field (the Canadian/British version of the American larger-than-life personalities field), Corner Gas centers on a combination gas station/coffee shop in Dog River, Saskatchewan between two truck routes. Life is slow, so the natives have grown sarcastic to cope. Brent Butt plays Brent Leroy (notice the changed last name), who runs the gas station and deals with his parents, Oscar and Emma. Wanda Dollard runs the convenience store inside the station, new girl in town Lacey Burrows owns the coffee shop, and the entire police force (Davis and Karen) come in constantly for coffee, while Brent's unemployed childhood friend Hank loiters around the gas station. The episodes are almost always standalones, with the traditional A-B-C plotlines which often interweave in some way, based more on character quirks than in forwarding any actual plot. It's low-key but quite fun, something I shared with my gently aging parents and they enjoyed a lot. The show has officially put its episodes up on YouTube; here's the first 10 minutes of the first episode: watch as much as you dare!

8 - Leverage, season 3 - 2010 - TNT - 16 eps., ~42 min. each.
Leverage hangs on through season 3 to stay on the top 10, though it drops several places. This is for two reasons: the quality of other shows I've seen during 2011, and also because of one conceit used for season 3 which I felt could have been done better. At the start, Nate and the team are forcibly recruited by a mysterious woman who gives them a dossier on master-criminal Damien Moreau, and tells them to infiltrate his organization and take him down, or she and those she works for will kill them. A powerful setup, right? The show then spends most of the next 10 episodes, the bulk of the season, involved in one-off jobs for clients with (save for two) no connection to Moreau. Then, the last five episodes form an arc involving the team getting closer and closer to Moreau; this last arc is extremely well done and cemented the show achieving the top 10 again, but it was frustrating to wait so long to have any movement on the season's arc. It makes me wonder if the arc was actually a late idea in planning the season, and they'd simply had several one-off episodes already plotted. And don't get me wrong, the one-offs are still quite good. In fact, Leverage is learning an old lesson from Columbo: when you need a villain, get a well-known actor. Tom Skerritt, Richard Chamberlain, Clancy Brown, Bruce Davison, Wil Wheaton, Dave Foley, Bill Engvall, Kari Wuhrer, and Spencer Garrett all have great small roles, many of them as villains, and Goran Visnjic appears as Damien Moreau. The cons are fun, they always go wrong, and the team scrambles to make them end up right. It's a formulaic show, but the characters are deep enough to make it interesting, plus it's just such a fun ride. Leverage also puts full episodes on YouTube; here's the first one from season 3. Watch at least the first 4:40 to get a good sense of the characters.

7 - Downton Abbey, season 1 - 2010 - ITV - 7 eps., 1 & 7 ~60 min., 2-6 ~45 min.
Hailed as the new "Upstairs, Downstairs" and garnering the most popularity and highest ratings in Britain for a period drama since 1981's production of "Brideshead Revisited," Downton Abbey ticks off several boxes on my list of favorite things in a TV show: huge ensemble cast (16 actors listed in the main credits); highly literate writing (by Julian Fellowes, screenwriter of Gosford Park, actor, director, and peer in the House of Lords); gorgeously realized world (shot on location at Highclere Castle in Hampshire - exteriors - interiors); interesting time period (1912-14, just before WWI); character-based and historical drama.

Downton is occupied by Robert, the Earl of Grantham and his American wife, Cora, their three daughters, and many servants. When the Earl's brother and nephew are both drowned in the sinking of the Titanic, the wedding between said nephew and Mary, the eldest daughter, can't happen. Unless Mary weds the next-closest male relative, a middle-class distant cousin named Matthew who works (!) for a living, an entail codified into the estate by Robert's late father means all the land, house, title, and money will go to Matthew and out of the Earl's family entirely. Matthew, kind but completely against adopting the lifestyle of a nobleman, is attracted to Mary, but Mary can't stand him; likewise, Mary's grandmother, the Dowager Countess (played to perfection by Maggie Smith) clashes with Matthew's mother, Isobel. The Countess and Cora try to break the entail; Robert tries to convince Matthew to take over the estate; Mary tries to fend off various other suitors who show up wanting to claim her and family's title and fortune. Meanwhile, below stairs, a new valet hand-picked by the Earl, and a new chauffeur with Socialist politics, upsets the balance of the household to the grief of the head butler; Cora's maid and one of the footmen conspire against their fellow servants and the family; and another maid gets unexpected help in trying to secure a new position from the youngest daughter of the house, who is secretly interested in women's sufferage.

If this all sounds like a vaguely arcane circuitous soap opera, it should, and encompasses the best of what period drama can offer. Most interestingly, it's a long-form, installment-based drama series not based on a prior literary work, giving a contemporary complexity to the storytelling which is subtle and fresh. These characters are not, by and large, of the thee-and-thou set often imagined by modernist British writers, but carefully articulated people who, although they know and play the roles set for them by their society and station, are motivated by the most human of emotions and convictions and interact with one another like all workplace families ever have. The show is extravagant, beautifully written and amazingly well-acted by the entire ensemble, the kind of special treat in television which comes around so rarely. Shown on PBS here in the States, here's a short clip of the first dinner with Matthew and his mother with the entire family, and a glimpse at the end of the kitchen and a few of the servants.

6 - Doctor Who, season 1 - 2005 - BBC - 13 eps., ~45 min each.
Okay, I really don't have a good defense for not having explored Doctor Who before, either the relaunched series or any of the original run. My rather crappy defense is this, the opening titles used in 1973, which was my first exposure to the series in a re-run on PBS when I was around 5 or 6 years old. It scared me half to death (especially the music, which now I find awesome), I had nightmares about it, and I cordially stayed away from all things Who until this year, when the clamoring of many voices here at Bluebell and elsewhere convinced me I needed to give at least the re-launched series a try. Purists apparently don't countenance the BBC's referring to the 2005-present series as seasons 1, 2, 3 etc. but rather as seasons 27, 28, 29 etc. because the show originally ran from 1963-1989. Regardless of whether the current show is grouped with the former, it's still the longest-running and arguably the most popular science fiction show ever.

And, after getting through the first two episodes, which were used mostly to introduce the characters and display how weird and cool the Doctor is, I was more impressed than I'd expected to be. Of course, any attempt at explaining most of the episodes would sound patently silly. Though many of them are quite good on their own, what I most liked was that they gradually form into an arc for the entire season, as secondary characters and villains reappear and become more important, various mysteries are revealed gradually and often by clues placed in earlier episodes, and by the end of the season there's a wide storyworld established, with frequent leaps into both the future and past, alternate realities, the whole shebang. Christopher Eccleston is quite good as the Ninth Doctor; Billie Piper as his new companion, Rose, is excellent. Both old and new characters are quite well written: eternal baddies the Daleks reappear in excellent ways (and apparently they can climb stairs now); the addition of Captain Jack Harkness (who eventually gets his own spin-off show, Torchwood, after season 2) is a brilliant invention, as he's in many ways a match for the Doctor in charm, cunning, and outrageous gadgetry.

All that said, Doctor Who is simply a very weird show. Plots involve everything from aliens secretly invading Britain to start World War III to ghostly apparitions of the recently dead haunting Charles Dickens to the Doctor and Rose having to travel 200,000 years into the future to stop a monster from holding human evolution back by controlling all journalism. As I say, explaining anything would sound ludicrous. However, even amid all the kooky stories and melodrama, the show is at its best in two episodes called "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" where the Doctor and Rose go back to London during the Blitz and discover a strange young boy wearing a gas mask, calling repeatedly for his mother. Horrified to learn that anyone the boy touches gets sick and then "grows" a gas mask onto their own face and adopts the boy's attitude and behavior, they set out to solve why this is happening and how it's tied into a ship transported from the future by a mysterious con man. That such a story could actually make me tear up at its resolution made me remember again how the most far-out science fiction could be so humanly real. I'm excited to continue catching up on this odd, wonderful show.

5 - Party Down, season 2 - 2010 - Starz - 10 eps., ~30 min. each.
Party Down is completely unlike Downton Abbey in every way (except for having an ensemble cast) and yet it also ticks off a number of boxes for me, albeit very different ones. It's about Hollywood, the most narcissistic of American institutions outside academia, and it's a dark comedy, at times so darkly comic that it must be what happens when the abyss looks back at you, and laughs. It has characters who are mostly stereotypes and, like good Hollywood stereotypes, are mostly clueless about that. It's got one straight-man (Henry, played by the delightfully grounded Adam Scott) surrounded by farce, so there's this beautifully realized arranging-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic aspect. Henry has an erstwhile love interest (Casey, played by the deadpan, droll Lizzy Caplan, who really is much more talented than Zooey Deschanel even though they look like twins) who would be great for him, except she's married and has enough relationship drama in her life already, thanks very much. Henry, known for a beer commercial he did which gained him lots of fame and destroyed his fledgling acting career, has rejoined the staff of Party Down, a catering company run by his friend and former employee Ron Donald (Ken Marino), who dreams of one day owning a Soup'R Crackers, a franchise-chain store offering fancy custom soups. (One wonders why such an eatery would be a good idea in sunny California.) Ron is every insecure middle manager you've ever met: a stickler for protocol and terrified of his boss but also desperate to be liked, and so both inconsistent and incompetent.

Rounding out the catering "team" are Roman (Martin Starr), a snobby aspiring screenwriter who loves horror movies and sci-fi and has never had a girlfriend, Kyle (Ryan Hansen), a surfer dude type actor who is dumb as dirt, and in season 1, Constance (Jane Lynch in her pre-Glee gig, which is why she's not in season 2) who should be killed for being so blissfully, ignorantly peppy. She has this great line in the pilot as she's coaching Kyle before an audition: "Kyle, you really have to commit to that moment. You know what Gene Hackman said to me when we were filming Lucky Lady? He said 'You should be committed.'" It's basically an encapsulation of her character. In season 2 her shoes are filled by Megan Mullally as Lydia, who's basically Constance but with a more maternal angle. Everyone's almost entirely self-interested, which sounds bad but actually turns out to be pretty funny, especially because pretty much everyone else at each of their catering events are the same way. It's a tidy setup, with each episode being a different catering gig at a different place with different guests. And the show was, like Carnivale, Yes Minister, and Primeval, something I enjoyed enough that I watched season 2 right after watching season 1. Both are great, but the second season is slightly better, because the first five episodes deal with (in order): rock stars, preschoolers, orgies, death, and Steve Guttenberg. You can see the natural progression there, of course. Here's a short clip from the "death" episode.

4 - The Wire, season 3 - 2004 - HBO - 12 eps., ~55 min. each.
Two years ago season 1 of The Wire achieved the #4 spot; last year, season 2 was mostly a disappointment and didn't crack the top ten. But season 3 is a return to form. The writers rightly realized that the Barksdale crew is the real source of drama and continuing interest for the story, and return it to the limelight, along with developing a strong side-story into the political structure of Baltimore and introducing new characters who are trying to decide if they can politically compete against the mayor in the next election. How they intertwine with the police department is a study in intricate self-interest and political play, and is perhaps the best plot strand in the season overall, though the motivating force for the season comes from another strong idea: a police major approaching retirement and under dictate to cut crime in his sector forms a novel and completely illegal approach, convincing the drug traffickers through various means to deal from three specific abandoned streets in the sector, promising free reign from police interference if they do so. The idea starts to work, with crime in every other neighborhood dropping dramatically while the three "free zones" run rampant and require intense police monitoring to prevent in-fighting (and also to keep them secret until the major can report long-term statistics to his bosses). Meanwhile, the special unit led by Cedric Daniels continues to pursue the Barksdale gang and its current head, Stringer Bell, who is trying to distance himself from the gang and become a legitimate businessman before kingpin Avon Barksdale is released from prison. Plot threads interweave and several from the first two seasons reappear in very satisfying and realistic ways, and the show at its best provides both a compelling realist narrative of crime as well as thoughtful ideological commentary on the law and justice. I'm very glad I stuck with the show after a plodding second season and look forward to continuing through seasons 4 and 5. Here's the official trailer promoting season 3.

3 - Game of Thrones, season 1 - 2011 - HBO - 10 eps., ~60 min. each.
I was passingly curious about Game of Thrones initially, having never read any George R.R. Martin, but I ended up doing something I don't usually do. I was housesitting for friends over a long weekend, and they subscribe to HBO, and the show's season had just ended. HBO was showcasing all episodes in HD for its subscribers, so I impulsively decided to watch the whole thing in 3 days. It was well-worth breaking my usual TV watching habits for. Yet another large ensemble show, this is perhaps the only one on the list this year which could also be described as epic in scope and execution. Eddard Stark, lord of the northern province of Winterfell and old friend and fellow soldier with Robert Baratheon, King of the Seven Kingdoms, is visited by the royal family and retinue so Robert can ask Eddard to come south, to the capital city of King's Landing, to be the King's Hand (a rather Chief of Staff-y position). However, the king is not really asking. As Eddard and his two daughters go south with the king, his wife Catelyn and his sons deal with unexpected treachery in Winterfell, and his bastard son Jon travels even further north, to The Wall, a giant ice blockade against wildings and in times past, the White Walkers, whom some claim have returned. Meanwhile, across the ocean, the children of the king Robert and Eddard overcame years earlier plot to unite with fierce horse-lords the Dothraki and return to claim the Seven Kingdoms for their own.

Game of Thrones is an adaptation of the first of seven books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, written by Martin and adapted very faithfully by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, with the idea being that each book becomes one season of the show. Condensing over 800 pages and countless characters, plus a whole medieval world, into 10 hours of television is a herculean task, but the result is an engaging, emotional, far-reaching story with well-drawn and acted characters in a wonderfully realized, atmospheric world. In other words: epic. The Stark, Baratheon, and Lannister clans (the latter the kin of Queen Cersei) are the focus of the season as well as the brother and sister of the old king, across the ocean. With so many characters, a localized show like Downton Abbey runs the risk of confusing who is who; in Game of Thrones, the number of characters plus their relationships plus the wide-ranging geography involved risks utter chaos. Cleverly and helpfully, the opening credits detail all geography covered in each episode, and the set designers, art directors, and costumers create memorable and different looks, sets, and color schemes for each major place and its inhabitants. The writing is serious and mature, not just in the typical HBO-showing-skin way, and the cast is uniformly excellent, especially Sean Bean as Eddard, Michelle Fairley as Catelyn, Kit Harington as Jon, Lena Headley as Cersei, Aiden Gillen as Petyr, and Peter Dinklage, who won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor as Tyrion Lannister.

Despite being an American production with American writers, the show is based in Northern Ireland and most of its cast and crew are British, Irish, and Continental European. The melding of all these cultures and attitudes in service of Martin's created, sort-of Anglo-Saxon, sort-of Francophone medieval world also adds a subtle depth of expression and believability to the Seven Kingdoms, as there are little touches, especially in artifacts and set designs, from many different historical cultures of the West. It gives the impression of a more gritty, "realistic" fantasy world than something like Tolkien; the narrative structure and dialogue of the show also reflects less of a "high fantasy" realm and more of a historical one. While the supernatural is not absent, "magic" seems to be, separating the world from other fantasy/history crosses like the Aurthurian legends. It's a careful and effective invention on Martin's part, and explored well by Benioff and Weiss. Season 2 premieres in April of next year, and I can't wait. For now, here's one of the official introductory trailers for season 1.

2 - The Hour, season 1 - 2011 - BBC - 6 eps., ~60 min. each.
The Hour was one of those shows I read three lines about and instantly knew it was for me. It offers a fictionalized story of a crucial period in British television's own history, when in the 1950s the BBC started to move away from, essentially, people with good radio voices simply reading the facts of the news over the air, into a more active, journalistic style including interviews, in-studio presentations, and commentary by newsmen and writers. Set in 1956 against the backdrop of the Suez Canal Crisis and a government desperate to shape this burgeoning approach to media to their benefit, the show follows the professional and romantic entanglements of Freddie Lyon, an ambitious young reporter unwillingly drawn into a cat-and-mouse game surrounding the death of the only daughter of a peer in the House of Lords, his best friend and boss Bel Rowley, who's been allowed to create a "test show" to see if this new kind of news program could work, and Hector Madden, a handsome anchor with family political connections chosen to be the face of the new broadcast simply titled "The Hour." As politics becomes personal and vice-versa, the three make a tenuous alliance (tenuous as both Freddy and Hector are attracted to Bel) as both G-men and spies begin tracking their movements.

In 2009 I complemented the BBC drama State of Play by saying it was television for grown-ups, and The Hour follows in that tradition, as well as being a spot-on period piece which borrows liberally from the Mad Men aesthetic of hyper-accuracy in all things great and small. The verisimilitude pays off well, though in a completely different way from Mad Men because this is essentially a spy story housed within a historical political drama rather than a search for individualism and identity housed within a cultural critique. Cultural critique is not absent, but is underplayed in the interest of the characters' personalities coming to the fore, in a smart move from creator/writer Abi Morgan. Ben Whishaw, Romola Garai, and Dominic West are excellent as the three leads, and of especial note is how Garai and so Bel has chemistry with both of them, in very different ways. The love triangle aspect is probably the least inventive part of the plot, but due to the writing and acting is saved from being an albatross around the story's neck. An intelligent show, it is ultimately modest in its aims and fulfills them amazingly well. Though not necessarily intended to be a continuing series, a second season was commissioned and is in the works, a delightful capstone to a truly enjoyable, fascinating story. Here's a clip from early in the first episode, showing Freddy and the usual way of doing the news, plus Bel after she's been given the producer job.

1 - Sherlock, season 1 - 2010 - BBC - 3 eps., ~90 min. each.
As I've said before on the blog, I know my Sherlock Holmes. Loved the stories and read all 60 in junior high, revisiting them several times since, loved the Rathbone/Bruce movies and radio dramas, loved the Grenada series from the 1980s starrting Jeremy Brett, love the two (so far) contemporary movies with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, even tried my hand at writing a Holmes story in college. And now I can add being over the moon at the new Sherlock series, helmed by brilliant scribes Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, performed by the wonderful Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Moffat and Gatiss are fanboys writing half the time for other fanboys, half the time just to tell complex mysteries and how the world's only consulting detective solves them. Unlike the current American movies, Sherlock updates the duo to present-day London: Holmes, with his anti-social tendencies, finds it much easier to text than to talk to people; Watson is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and suffers from PTSD. They meet the same way they met in the original novel "A Study in Scarlet," as Watson encounters an old medical school friend who introduces the two, as they're both hard up and looking to share digs with someone. Of course, since it's the 21st Century, their new landlady simply assumes they're a gay couple.

It's a joy watching how Moffat and Gatiss deal with the little things from the books, things only a devotee would notice. For example, Conan Doyle contradicts himself in different stories by giving Watson's war wound location as the leg or the shoulder; Moffat and Gatiss work it out by it actually being the shoulder while Watson's PTSD manifests itself as a phantom wound in his leg. In another perfect fanboy moment, a murder victim has been able to scratch out the letters "rache" with her fingernail before she died. In the original story, the same is written on the wall in blood after a murder. It's a German word which means "revenge" and in the episode the police coroner claims that's what it is and means. Holmes immediately dismisses him as stupid and says the victim was trying to write the name "rachel" and couldn't finish, which turns out to be right.

The energy that Cumberbatch and Freeman bring to their roles is undeniable, and balanced perfectly between each other; it helps too that Moffat and Gatiss have envisioned this Holmes and Watson as young men in their late 20s, just starting to make their way in the world. Despite the difference in ages, they have all correctly taken their cues from the original stories, as well as from the Brett/Hardwicke productions, which were mostly faithful to the texts. Though fun, the idea of Holmes as an action hero, as imagined from a few lines of text in the original stories where Holmes is good at boxing and expanded into the Downey Jr. version, isn't appropriate. The writers and Cumberbatch understand that Holmes' key weapon is not brawn but brain, and that his key weakness is not his pride but rather his lack of empathy: in perhaps the best line of the first episode, the police coroner, who like most of the cops can't stand Holmes, argues for arresting him because he is in possession of a murder victim's suitcase. "We found it in the hands of our favorite psychopath," he says, and Holmes whips around to reply in anger, "I'm not a psychopath, Anderson, I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research." Watson, as a medical doctor, is no stranger to the dark side of society but has kept his humanity regardless, and it's in this way he's a necessary counterpoint to Holmes. Freeman's Watson is quietly intelligent, observant, and loyal in a way Holmes needs more than he realizes. The first season introduces Holmes' nemesis as well; the 21st Century version of James Moriarty is still a mathematician and professor, a child prodigy, a bit of a dandy, and quite insane.

The look and feel of the show complement the updated characters. Text messages are displayed to the viewer as they happen rather than trying to incorporate camera shots of phones or characters reading texts aloud, which is a surprisingly seamless and effective innovation. 221B Baker Street is next-door to a sandwich shop. Mrs. Hudson has to continually remind the two that she's their landlady, not their housekeeper. There's no deerstalker hat or pipes or tobacco slipper; Holmes wears a plain black long coat, and when he needs "stimulation" he slaps a few nicotine patches onto himself. Detective Inspector Lestrade is still around, with the show taking him as a capable if unimaginative man who, against his better judgment, lets Holmes snoop around his cases. Perhaps most drastic in terms of updates, and yet it makes perfect sense, is that Holmes and Watson don't call each other Holmes and Watson, but Sherlock and John, like every other set of flatmates does. The format is in an interesting one as well, with only three episodes but each at 90 minutes, like three movies. The only other show I can think of employing the same format is Foyle's War, and both share the basic idea of presenting slow-burning mysteries alongside character exploration and development. While I'd gladly take more episodes of Sherlock, the longer running time is richly used and lets the writers establish a great rhythm for the series. Season 2 will be broadcast in Britain in January, and in the States on PBS in May. For now, here's one of the official trailers for season 1, as well as a short but weighty interaction between Holmes and Watson.

Top 10 Albums of 2011, Second Half

2011-12-12T20:42:00.000-05:00

So, after looking at my list for the second half of the year, all from 2011, and thinking about the first half of the year, 3 of 5 the same, I've come to a decision: next year I will not buy or listen to any albums released in 2012. There's far too many past albums and bands I need to catch up with. It's a silly statement, of course; there will undoubtedly be exceptions, and off the top of my head I can think of two. Crooked Still singer Aoife O'Donovan is supposed to release her first solo album next year, and if Sixpence None the Richer ever get themselves together and release the Strange Conversation album, which was supposed to come out in 2010, I'll be picking that up. But by and large I want to avoid new releases, odd as that may be. The upside to all five albums being from 2011 is that all of the artists are touring (or have released live performance video) so along with suggested tracks there'll be Youtube links.

artist - album - 2011

5 - Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile - The Goat Rodeo Sessions - 2011. A sort of contemporary string-based supergroup, this half-bluegrass half-classical album is an odd but enjoyable collaboration, blending genres in often unpredictable ways. Of the 11 songs, 9 are instrumentals, with the other two having duet vocals with Chris Thile and guest singer Aoife O'Donovan. One of these, "Here and Heaven," is a standout track, delicate and expressive, about a relationship which has known both joy and sorrow. But by and large, most of the rest of the tracks are just plain old fun rather than being particularly emotive. For much of the album this works well, especially in the aw-shucks farm song "Helping Hand" and the classically-leaning amused musings of "Where's My Bow?" More ambitious tracks like the gentle "Franz and the Eagle" and the tour-de-force "Less is Moi" achieve both a precision and a gracefulness which in the former becomes something quite heroic, and in the latter something mischevious. Despite the surpassing skill and ingenuity on display, a few criticisms can be leveled. First, as with other collectives Chris Thile has been involved with, his musical personality can be overwhelming, and a couple tracks sound like they're from a Chris Thile solo album with uncommonly strong session musicians. Second and more importantly, the album loses some focus in many small places, a result of too much noodling and an overemphasis on esorteric song construction. Quite simply, there aren't enough strong melody lines in some tracks and much effectiveness is lost. However, even when this foursome is too inward-looking, such as the aptly named "13/8," they're interesting to listen to, and when they remember to be appealing to the ear and not just the brain, which is definitely over half the album, it's a fun experience. Suggested tracks: Attaboy, Where's My Bow?, Here and Heaven, Franz and the Eagle, Less is Moi. Watch a studio performance of "Attaboy" on Youtube.

4 - Crooked Still - Friends of Fall - 2011. Because of intentions to take an extended break from recording and touring together in 2012, Crooked Still decided to release an EP this year comprised of 5 covers and 2 original pieces, and in live shows this fall and winter have been playing the EP in its entirely, plus older favorites. The choice of artists to cover is indicative of the kind of band they are: Paul Simon, The Beatles, a traditional hymn, Hazel Dickens (Appalachian bluegrass), John Hartford (modern bluegrass), and one of the original compositions takes its title and lyrics from a poem by Wendell Berry. Clocking in at less than 25 minutes, the EP is short and sweet, with a slightly tossed-off production style: no polish applied to notes or tones here, something which was carefully, selectively done on their previous record. There's also a sense of the workaday about the EP, with few low-key musical flourishes, something I'd be wary of on a full-length release (and almost antithetical to something like The Goat Rodeo Sessions) but the song choices complement this well. It provides another, welcome perspective on Crooked Still as a band who, despite their reputation for precision and perfection, also sometimes like to sit out on the porch as the sun's going down, put their feet up, and just play some solid music. After all, what Beatles song could be more straightforward than "We Can Work It Out"? What Paul Simon song, in a lifetime of understated Paul Simon songs, could be more plaintive than "American Tune"?

The reworked hymn, "When Sorrows Encompass Me 'Round," receives the standard minor key tweaking we do to hymns in the 21st Century; the John Hartford tune, "Morning Bugle," sounds like a saunter down a wooded lane without a care in the world, like something out of the early '70s Disney animated Robin Hood. (And if you're wondering where I got that from, the original song was written in 1972.) For those wanting a little more of the expected quirkiness from Crooked Still, there's the two original tracks, "It'll End Too Soon" and "The Peace of Wild Things/Dayblind," the latter a combination of the aforementioned Wendell Berry poem and a free-spirited instrumental. The wild card on the album is the Hazel Dickens song, "Pretty Bird," perhaps the slowest track the band have ever recorded. It may be a little too slow, a little too breathy, a little too simple in its arrangement. Or maybe it's just me. Regardless, Friends of Fall is a classic example you can use to explain to people the difference between an album and an EP: it's short, under-produced, not overly showy, and gives the band a chance to air themselves out, show themselves a little more relaxed and a little less polished. For Crooked Still it's a glimpse of a side not often publicly seen, and it's quite enjoyable. Suggested tracks: It'll End Too Soon, We Can Work it Out, Morning Bugle. Watch a live performance of It'll End Too Soon on Youtube.

3 - Steve Hackett - Beyond the Shrouded Horizon - 2011. A year ago this month my #1 spot went to Steve's Hackett's 2009 album Out of the Tunnel's Mouth, a return to the prog rock roots he came from in Genesis, with an updated, harder sound and a suite of songs with some real emotional force. In the wider world that album did very well for him and quickly became a favorite among his fans, so it's unsurprising that the follow-up, this year's Beyond the Shrouded Horizon, continues in the same vein. Most of the time it's a worthy sequel but a few songs feel unfinished, as if they were incomplete ideas from the earlier project and got tacked onto this album instead. The one thing that's changed is instead of a smaller number of songs which were worked on carefully and often longer than 5 or 6 minutes in length, this album gives us 13 tracks, half of them rather undeveloped, 5 of them under 3 minutes. 2 of these 5 are merely instrumental take-offs of the song which comes before or after it. It's an oddly fragmented and yet repetitive approach, reflective of the album as a whole, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. The record begins with a blistering song called "Loch Lomond," in no way related to the traditional Scottish tune other than being about the same subject, and extends its musical themes into "The Phoenix Flown," and these are among the most successful tracks.

After a brief acoustic interlude (nice enough, but at 44 seconds not really articulated enough to be its own song) there's one of the few short tracks which also works, the ballad "'Til These Eyes," followed by the another two-part sequence, the instrumental and anthemic "Prairie Angel" and the sadly hokey "A Place Called Freedom," whose music is fun but lyrics are sub-par. I question again why the same theme needed to be treated twice in songs next to each other on the record. And from here, track 7 onward, the album mostly treads water, the music and lyrics fine enough but again, feeling like cast-offs from the previous record. "Two Faces of Cairo" expands upon the intensity of the Middle Eastern vibe in the previous album's "Last Train to Istanbul" in good ways, and the album closer, "Turn This Island Earth," contains flashes of intelligent, rewarding musical craftsmanship, but overall this album may have needed another few months in the rewriting process. However, it occurs to me that I've groused about the shortcomings of this much more than the albums at #5 and #4, so I do want to say that Hackett & Co. achieve the #3 spot because, just like their previous outing, when they get it right, they get it 100% right. And it's also like your little brother: because you love him, you feel freer to criticize him, though you'll staunchly defend him to others who criticize him. So let's say that for me, this is a clear #3 slot album, but you should check it out only if you particularly enjoyed Out of the Tunnel's Mouth. Suggested tracks: Loch Lomond, The Phoenix Flown, 'Til These Eyes, Prairie Angel. Watch a live performance of Loch Lomond/The Phoenix Flown on Youtube.

2 - Peter Gabriel - New Blood - 2011. Like his former fellow bandmate, Peter Gabriel's last album signaled a new direction and was interesting enough to many that he decided to carry it forward to a sequel. 2010's Scratch My Back, which made my #1 spot a year and a half ago, was an entirely orchestral album with Peter singing 12 cover songs from artists new and old. When he took the album on a brief tour which I got to see, he played the album start to finish but then needed a second set, and so he and composer John Metcalf adapted several songs from his own back catalog for orchestra. New Blood, a cute-but-apt title for this record, is composed of 13 songs from his history (14 with "Father, Son" if you order from his website, and 15 with "Blood of Eden" and "Signal to Noise" if you order from iTunes) re-done with the orchestra. (A second disc, which comes in physical CD format as well as the iTunes download, gives the backing, orchestra-only tracks for the original 13 songs.) Simply put, the result is an achievement, a real injection of new life and new perspective into these tracks, many of them old favorites like "In Your Eyes," "Red Rain," "Digging in the Dirt," and "Solsbury Hill." Peter also walks down the road less traveled, ignoring other popular or signature songs (like "Sledgehammer," "Games Without Frontiers," "Biko," "Steam") to include lesser-known tracks never released as singles but that translate well to orchestra, like "Downside-Up," "Wallflower," "Darkness," and "Intruder."

Peter's voice, well worn with years, provides weight to some of the more airy, lighter pieces, and is still able to soar powerfully into falsetto when a song requires it, with almost nary a key change to the original track. This means some of the songs are emotionally powerful in a similar way to the originals, such as in "San Jacinto" and "Digging in the Dirt," but others adapt and show their versatility as songs by being just as potent, but only in a way an orchestra can convey. Most obvious among these is "The Rhythm of the Heat," on record in 1982 ending in a great cavalcade of drums but here a showcase for high and low strings playing counterpointed rhythms ending in a tightly interwoven frenzy. On the softer side, slower and more contemplative pieces like "Mercy Street" and "Wallflower" are provided with a rich, warm atmosphere of layered sounds, the latter grounded in a simple and beautiful piano melody. Orchestra or no, this is still your standard intense, emotionally raw, predominantly dark Peter Gabriel album. The moments of simple joy and release are few, but all the sweeter because of it: the chorus to "Downside-Up" positively rings with the bustle and excitement of a Spring morning; the intro and chouses of In Your Eyes are like a triumphal procession; the playfulness of "Solsbury Hill" laughs in a new way by the main melody line, for the first time in its 34-year history, on piano instead of guitar.

Not every track is a home run, of course. While the music to "Don't Give Up" is quite good, Ane Brun isn't a strong choice for sharing vocal duties with Peter. While the closing section of "The Rhythm of the Heat" is excellent, the opening part basically just recreates the original song. And that's fine, but with such a marked departure for the second section, it's jarring that the first seems so old hat. The entirely instrumental "The Nest that Sailed the Sky" is beautiful, but we already had an entirely instrumental, mostly orchestral original version on Ovo. With so many other options for a low-key song in its place (for example, both "Washing of the Water" and "Lead a Normal Life" were recorded for the project but not used) it seems wasteful to have included it. Likewise, the five minutes of ambient noise recorded on the literal Solsbury Hill in Somerset placed before that song feels surperfluous. I would give much for the orchestral version of Secret World, my all-time favorite of Peter's songs, which was performed on the tail end of this summer's tour, to have been arranged and recorded in time to replace these silly chirping crickets.

Still, overall it's a great achievement and a highly enjoyable album I'll be listening to for a long time to come. One of the things I've always liked about Peter is how he continually thinks and re-thinks his older material, through edits and remixes and giving tracks to other people to remix, and even performing different mixes from time to time. New Blood seems very much in line with that tradition and preoccupation, and strikes an almost perfect balance between nostalgia and reinterpretation. If you like Peter's music in the past, and liked the production values and decisions he made on Scratch My Back, you'll like this album too. Suggested tracks: Downside-Up, Wallflower, In Your Eyes, Red Rain, Digging in the Dirt, Intruder. Watch a performance of The Rhythm of the Heat from the official New Blood Live in London DVD, on Youtube.

1 - Gillian Welch - The Harrow and the Harvest - 2011. However, this year, nothing tops the long-awaited fifth album from Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. Released seven years after their last record, the title is a true statement, as much of the past seven years were fallow, in a songwriting sense, for the acoustic duo, who kept at it through much disappointment and have emerged on the other side with this, a brilliant powerhouse of an album rivaling and in places surpassing their 2001 magnum opus, Time (the Revelator). Intentionally structured in the same way as that album, with just their two guitars (or a guitar and banjo) and two voices, apart from a rare use of harmonica and some percussive stomps, recorded live without overdubs, the stripped-down sound fits perfectly for their vocals and lyrics. I reviewed the concert I went to two months ago, but here I want to just talk about the album. It's a masterpiece. From the first few notes of "Scarlet Town," with its small rhythmical echo of the opener from their second album, "Caleb Meyer," we are clearly in well-worn and well-loved territory, as an unequal, emotionally abusive relationship is explored through the images and analogy of an abandoned village falling into disrepair and haunted by the memory of evil.

If Gillian and Dave's writing were only dark, however, that wouldn't make for an overly interesting album. They add being sardonic to the next track, a lonely yet forthright ballad pleading for a little love. Gillian's voice kicks off concurrent to the music: "Take me, and love me, if you want me/Don't ever treat me unkind/'Cause I've had that trouble already/and it left me with a dark turn of mind." The song aches from raw beauty, and I'm not just saying that because I had such a strong emotional connection to it. It's a good lead-in to the third track, a personal favorite, perhaps an all-time favorite, and the most haunted song on the album. It was also one of the very first to be written, and has been played in their live sets for eight years now: "The Way It Will Be." Highly imagistic, orbiting around the present absence of a non-romantic relationship long gone (father? mentor? best friend?), it's forceful in its softness, hard and unyielding in its lyrics, deliberately meshing off-key chords into certain moments, with not a drop of sweetness to be found anywhere, and no musical resolution. It seems almost paltry to refer to it as bleak; were it not for the sheer, blinding life-force of the narrator, it could almost be nihilistic. This is songwriting at its finest: horror on display without letting it overwhelm, or become maudlin, or for mere "show." There's not a speck of sentimentality in this song, but there's also no attitude of defeat. One simply goes on, and there's a release in being able to communicate, to explicate. Even if it's only in an obscure way, the emotional pressure is released, aired, made real and therefore made understandable. Songwriting at its finest.

More accessible and thankfully more upbeat (in music, anyway) is the next song and first single released from the album, "The Way It Goes." It's one of those almost-story songs, of snapshots tied together by a highly singable, highly inscrutable chorus, where you feel like if only you had a page of backstory, all would be revealed. As it is, like most Appalachian songs, we enter and exit people's lives in the middle, knowing what we know of them and no more. Like life most of the time. Dave also gets two fun guitar solos on this track, quirky and tongue-in-cheek riffs which go hand in hand with lyrics such as "So the brightest ones of all/early in October fall/while the dark ones go to bed/with good whiskey in their heads" or "Now Billy Joe's back in the tank;/you tell Musso, I'll tell Frank/Did he throw her down a well/Did she leave him for that swell?" Most ingenious about the song, however, is its use of progressive assonance, traveling over the course of the song from a predominance in the verses of long As and long Os, to short Es, Is, and Us, making the chorus ("That's the way that it goes/everybody's buying baby clothes/That's the way that it ends/though there was a time when she and I were friends") a microcosm of this movement through the song as a whole. Even the last line of the chorus changes, to emphasize an inclusiveness, from "she and I" to "he and I," "all of us," and ending with "you and I." The track bears well under scrutiny, and yet it flows easily like a good wine, like any good pop single should.

In the interest of time I won't get too intricate with the rest of the tracks; the next, "Tennessee," tells of the half-lament, half-resignation of a life lived far from home and family. Then the following song, "Down Along the Dixie Line," a waltz, focuses on the virtues of Southern family and culture. It feels like it's out of a Mark Twain short story. In many ways it's quite a happy song, perhaps the only one on the album. The most upbeat song follows, augmented by some playful harmonica and claps and stomps right out of a hootenany. The subject matter, of course, is death, and the "six white horses" who carry the hearse, are "coming two by two/come for my mother/no matter how I love her." As expected, by the end of the song it's "six white horses/coming after me/pretty as a picture/certain as a Scripture." "Hard Times" is next, another personal favorite, and a story song about a Depression-era farmer who tries not to give up on life, with his land and his mule at his side. That description makes it sound ironic, or worse, syrupy, but it's just quiet and sad, as the world slowly makes clear that it couldn't care less for his life or his troubles. Still, there's a certain nobility to the song, and even a degree of hope, a rare achievement for any character in Gillian and Dave's world. The odd duck song, "Silver Dagger," is second-to-last, and an interesting experiment. It adapts the melody to "You Are My Sunshine" to speak in the character of a young naive woman convinced her lover is the most wonderful man alive, sensitive and true, who believes in her and has shown her a wider world. So great is her self-deception, she merely chronicles, without any understanding, at the end of the song that "here comes my baby/here comes my man/with that silver dagger in his hand." It doesn't quite work to its potential as a song, because it feels off to have a narrator without self-knowledge. As songwriters Gillian and Dave are hyper-aware of themselves and their characters almost always share that trait. It's somehow disappointing to find one that doesn't.

The last track goes back to the sardonic, gentle snark latently apparent in several of the previous songs and expands on it to the extent that this atittude is pretty much what the song is about, and it's fittingly titled "That's the Way the Whole Thing Ends." Almost a playful, devil-may-care version of the same subject matter as "The Way It Will Be," the singer repeatedly explains to an unseen former friend how dumb they were to throw away their friendship. The chorus plays around with variations of the lines "Standing in the back door cryin',/now you're gonna need a friend/That's the way the cornbread crumbles,/that's the way the whole thing ends." The song extends itself through several verses and a long outro with some great picking by Dave, ending up on a simple, playful progression which, in a move which makes me chuckle and I'm sure was supposed to, resolves beautifully into the individual notes of one of those happy major chords to close the album. It's a brilliant little send-off, to end so peacefully when clearly that's not the whole story, not really how "the whole thing" will actually end. And how many artists can write such heart-wrenching material over the course of a record and then end it firmly with their tongue in their cheek this way? These guys, that's who. I continue to love their music and writing and performing style, and after seven years away, it's wonderful to see them back at the top of their game with this release. Suggested tracks: Dark Turn of Mind, The Way It Will Be, The Way It Goes, Tennessee, Hard Times, The Way The Whole Thing Ends. Watch a live performance of Dark Turn of Mind from Later with Jools Holland on Youtube.

Because I Wanted to Post Something in November

2011-11-30T23:07:00.000-05:00

I've been wanting to write a post for the blog for the past two weeks. But about what? My ideas so far had all resulted in that common condition where you get a great first paragraph and then it fizzles somewhere in the second. Writing about what I'm thankful for in this season of thankfulness? No, there wasn't any way I could write it that didn't sound smug when I re-read it. Writing about my growing dissatisfaction with people whining on Facebook? No, that's easy enough: you don't complain about it, you just stop looking at Facebook frequently. A paean to my new girlfriend? No, that kind of intimacy isn't what I intended for this blog, and in any case we're both rather private people. (If you're curious you're welcome to ask about us through some other, more personal communique.) And then I thought of The Old Republic.

The Old Republic is the new Star Wars MMORPG being released in December by BioWare and LucasArts, and my World of Warcraft guild is switching, whole-hog, away from WoW and to the new game. If you remember my August 2008 and March 2010 posts about WoW, or if you just clicked through and re-read them, you'll know that I've been playing WoW with a sizeable handful of Bluebell and Pondicherry folks for, at this point, just over 5 years. Why the switch, and why now? The first answer, of course, is that it's a Star Wars MMO, and a highly anticipated one. While some of us were passingly interested in the Lord of the Rings and Star Trek MMOs, they didn't attract enough of us to really move towards and weren't overly well received by the gaming community generally, and while the Firefly MMO might well have persuaded us, that game never got out of the planning stages and died an early death. As of our guild's current configuration, the three most consistent gamers were all really excited about The Old Republic, or TOR, and convinced the rest of us to go with them. For my part I wasn't all that thrilled about starting over again in a new gameworld, but at the same time, was intrigued by that gameworld being set in the Star Wars universe, albeit thousands of years before the events of the movies we know and love (along with the movies we know and are acutely unpleasant to watch).

The final nail in the WoW coffin, however, happened because of Blizzard itself: when they announced earlier this fall that the next expansion would be Mists of Pandaria, involving a new race of intelligent pandas who know kung fu, and that a new hero class called the Monk would be added to the game, we all had to admit that WoW has jumped the shark, and we're ready to call it a day. There's other, more behind-the-scenes reasons we don't like Mists of Pandaria too. The expansion seems to be modeled mostly on the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, in that there's to be a newly discovered continent in the gameworld which, frankly, has no connection to anything that came before in the game, and has to be awkwardly patched into backstories about the world. This feels very artificial. Like Burning Crusade, there's a new race with new starting zones for that race, but then players are dumped into the regular gameworld and don't get to go back to the new one until their characters are at level 85. The Wrath of the Lich King expansion introduced the first hero class, the Death Knight, which could perform several roles in a raiding party and started at level 55. But the Monk class starts at level 1 and seems geared towards only one role. Additionally, Blizzard decided to, with the Cataclysm expansion, greatly increase stats on enemies and gear and weapons, so by the end of that expansion attacks could hit - at "critical" or high levels, with the best gear - for somewhere approaching 10,000 damage, and bosses had health points in the hundreds of thousands. Now they've realized such exponential stats will grow ludicrous if they continue along the same trajectory, and they need to "nerf" stats throughout the game to compensate. This is, to use an expression from our guild which evokes disdain and dissatisfaction, "weak sauce."

TOR, from what we gather so far, has some similarities in execution and gameplay to WoW, but story and choices that characters make will have a much greater effect on how the game develops for each person. With WoW, it's a set path - which in many ways can be accomplished by various means - but the storylines of characters are all of a piece. Events happen in the gameworld which all players must respond to in the same way. With TOR, after picking one side or the other, Galactic Republic or Sith Empire, there are only 4 character classes per faction. However, each class has two specializations which are developed as the character goes along, and decisions that players make - for example, how they interact with NPCs, as there are often at least 3 different responses a character can make in a single interaction - affect which quests they're given, what rewards they receive, how they advance in their respective faction, and even, for Jedi and Sith, how they stand with the Light or Dark side of the Force, which further affects what opportunities they're given. Also, WoW groupings for cooperative play in instances involved a minimum of 5 players, scaling up to 40, whereas in TOR it seems the largest groupings involve 8 players. For us, a small guild with (likely) around 10 members, this is really good news, as there can be more cooperative gameplay since it will require fewer players overall.

I can't go very much into the mechanics and play of TOR simply because I haven't played it yet, and won't until it releases in mid-December. However, one of the decisions our guild made, along with choosing to be a Sith Empire guild, is that we would play on a role-playing (RP) server. For RP, you interact in character with your guildies and with other players in the gameworld. This means we are all creating characters with backstories and personalities we'll inhabit while we play. My own character will be a Sith Inquisitor named Raymus Qel-Davro, and I've been working on his backstory with helpful input from my friends Frosty and TBO. Here's what I have so far, for your reading amusement:

As an only child on Alderaan known as Raymus Davro, I was nephew of the king, cousin and playmate of the prince; my mother, the king’s sister, had married one of his counselors. The union was, from the little I remember, more pragmatic than suited, my father often away on the king’s business, and distant even when present. As I grew, certain traits and abilities, some of which I had no control over, became manifest and my mother grew concerned. After much research, she concluded that I had a connection to the Force, something none of my family possessed as far back as our genealogies could tell. She pressured me to hide my abilities best as I could, and soon enough I understood why: along with the galactic war raging around us, the king was dealing with several factions from other clans anxious to rule Alderaan. He would try diplomacy with them first, but if that failed, more and more frequently he began exiling those who challenged him or any with authority the clans could co-opt.

Inevitably, his jealous gaze alighted on me, and before my 14th birthday I was banished from Alderaan. Because of the royal blood in my veins, and because my father was not of royal lineage, I could both choose the planet of my exile, and keep my name. My father, concerned more for his own position than for his son, removed himself from the deliberations and decisions, but my mother encouraged and helped me as much as she could. Secretly contacting the Jedi Order, who were popularly blamed for the war, she made arrangements for me to travel to Coruscant, to train under them and also to research and discover from which long-forgotten ancestor I had inherited this blessing and curse. My training, under the Duros called Falnlee, made for long and frustrating hours. Falnlee, an awkward and shy being, commanded my respect only by his powerful mastery of the Force. Though I learned my lessons, I was an almost constant truant, pushing at his boundaries and, after a while, seeking only to anger him. There was a small group of us who felt similarly and we often escaped together into the alleys and deserted parts of the city to practice our combat skills.

One day, soon before I turned 18, from a chance remark about my stubborn persistence in these little games, it occurred to me that my unknown ancestor had perhaps been Sith, not Jedi. Sneaking into the Jedi libraries over many nights, I finally unearthed part of an ancient hierarchy of Sith warriors which included a secret child, a daughter, born to the Sith sorceress Aleema Keto by Ulic Qel-Droma, the Jedi who became a Sith and later came crawling back, a traitor to both Orders. That daughter had a daughter, who had a daughter, whose name I clearly remembered from my bloodline in the dusty genealogies my mother had poured over on Alderaan. I had my answer, and it was a double-edged sword, for Ulic disgusted me, but my heart thrilled to know that the blood of Aleema Keto was my own. I began referring to myself as Raymus Qel-Davro, taking the least offensive part of my ancestor’s name as I took his conflicted nature and Keto’s Sith blood.

The remaining few years of the war were restless ones for me, for while the galaxy seethed around us, care was taken for nothing to trouble the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, and our lessons continued as if a great wall had been erected around us. My “friends,” who before were only too happy to escape our masters, now turned traitor and either squealed to Falnlee or refused to acknowledge me any longer. More of my time was spent alone in the dark alleys and empty buildings outside the Temple, where I devised games to amuse myself, using the Force to torment animals and shifting pieces of concrete which had crumbled from the decrepit walls. My subtleties in using Force powers grew, and when Falnlee caught me I was punished severely, though the torment made less and less of an impression on me.

The peace talks on Alderaan were announced, and I was in a black mood. Falnlee had caught me yet again, and for much of the past week I’d been in solitary confinement, nursing my rage in one of the tower cells. The day came, and started like any other, but suddenly the Sith attacked; from the tower window I could see three huge battleships advancing through the sunlight and then the world was one of smoke, ash, and fire. An exploding battery of shells hit below and I could feel the earth and the Temple tremble and shake, and the door to my cell was shifted off its hinges. I ran, heedless of anyone around me. Someone shouted and gave chase, some other acolyte who had been among the better behaved set, and without a second thought, I used the Force to bring an already-tottering guardpost hut down on top of him. The surge of power in the Force I felt as he died was like nothing I’d had felt before: a sense of cold control, and of destruction, like an icy grip which simultaneously enveloped me but which I ruled. Almost before I’d realized it, I’d stolen a speeder and was deep into the maze of streets and alleyways. The next three days were savage, as I slunk among abandoned buildings which were still standing and killed whatever animals I could find for food. Though the calamitous noises grew more distant, the smoke only settled down further on the cityscape, and the wind merely moved ash from here to there. On the fourth morning, I was awakened by a sudden pain, seeming to course through my whole body, but then it suddenly stopped. Retching from the violence of it, I sat up to see a hooded figure in the doorway of my hiding place, a handful of soldiers behind him. I felt a hard, dark presence in my mind, which I strove to understand but eluded me, and then a voice thick with controlled anger dismissed the soldiers.

The conversation was brief, and I was eager. Lord Vermis of the Sith Empire became my true master, and told me all of how our glorious Emperor had tricked the Republic, sending the Sith to destroy the Jedi Temple and much else on Coruscant, holding it hostage for “peace terms” on Alderaan which were nothing short of surrender. Lord Vermis took me to Korriban, where I was to complete my training in the Academy, and where I have been for the past four years. When news of Prince Panteer’s departure from the Senate became known, and Alderaan’s secession from Republic, he earned a modicum of respect from me, this childhood playmate, though it gave me great pleasure to hear of his assassination soon after. I only wished I could have twisted the knife. For I am an Inquisitor and further, an Assassin for our most powerful Emperor. One day I will sit at the Emperor’s table of twelve counselors, with all power and authority of the Sith in my hands, and judge entire planets, entire races, perhaps a quadrant of the galaxy to terrorize for my own delight. The years will be long but I have now, at 27 years, come to the end of my training, and I am ready to serve the Emperor and the Empire in its magnificent victories over all in the galaxy who oppose us.

The Fall Harvest

2011-10-30T20:28:00.005-04:00

Maybe some people are easy to buy gifts for, but I've never been that person, and so I'm a firm believer in buying myself presents at my birthday and Christmas and the like. For my birthday this year, I bought myself this:

Well, no, I didn't buy myself two pieces of notepaper covered in Sharpie, not exactly. For many years now, how many I don't remember, I've been a fan of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, a married songwriting team writing modern old-time bluegrass, recording and touring under her name (apart from one album and tour in 2009, of an alt-country style, under his name). Their fourth album, Soul Journey, came out in June 2003 and I can remember listening to it often during August of that year, as I traveled back and forth up the mountain to Buttered Biscuit. Once I almost went off the side of the twisty, turn-filled road because I was listening to "I Made a Lover's Prayer" perhaps a little too intently. That's the effect the quality of their music has on me, an urgency of needing to stop and listen and strain to hear a still, small voice coming through that raw plainsong and that 1935 Epiphone guitar. It's been a long time since they graced us with new music, 8 years to be exact. In June of this year their fifth album, The Harrow and the Harvest, was released, and unless something quite surprising happens in the next two months, it will be #1 on my top 5 albums from the second half of 2011.

For a few years I've been on the official Gillian Welch email list, but concerts have been sporadic and on the West Coast or in Nashville. The side album released in Dave Rawlings' name which had a full tour in spring 2010, which I was able to catch, but it wasn't the real experience of a Gillian Welch show as the music was simply different and the old tunes weren't played. But this time around, there's a tour spanning four months and covering the U.S. plus the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the British Isles. Kindly providing their email list with a pre-sale password, I was able to grab two 3rd row tickets for myself and a friend a few months in advance; the show itself was to be four days before my birthday.

So of course you now realize what the picture above is: it's their setlist for the night. Posted on Fanity along with setlists for most of the shows during the tour, it documents two hours of happiness in my life. From the third row we could see the glances they gave each other when an audience member shouted out a song request they weren't particularly interested in, the raised eyebrows when a guitar absolutely refused to get into proper tuning before a song, the different sizes of picks Rawlings was using on his Epiphone, and the way they didn't need to look at each other at all to sing harmonies and improvise bars of material in the middle of songs or when they extended a couple of tracks another minute or more past the recorded versions.

Starting with the song from their debut album which brought them instant acclaim, "Orphan Girl" sent up applause from all corners of the packed theater. Then 15 years vanished in an instant as they transitioned to "Scarlet Town," the opening track of the new album, and added an extra 16 bars to the end. "Dark Turn of Mind," the new album's second track and a personal favorite, followed. It ends with the lines: "Some girls are bright as the morning/and some girls are blessed/ with a dark turn of mind." "One Morning" was next; a song narrated by an old woman at the end of the Civil War, it's a musically and lyrically jarring, jangled song as she sees her son on his horse, coming back through the fields and under the willows, dying from his wounds. This got an extended ending as well. As if sensing the mood was too somber, a change in the set was made on the fly (they do that a lot) and next we were given the upbeat "I Want to Sing That Rock 'n Roll." But of course we can't have two happy songs in a row (partly because they just don't have too many of them), and the groove-oriented, pleasantly wistful "Wayside/Back in Time" was moved to after the "new" track "The Way It Will Be." I'll have more to say about this song when I review the new album, but let it suffice to say now that this mind-blowing, incredible piece, kicking around in live sets since at least 2004, was the highlight of the show for me, the words fragile and the guitars brash, as it's also the highlight of the new album.

Up next came the new album's first single, "The Way It Goes," a subtly devastating song about the way we live in these troubled times, encapsulated in uptempo riffs and pop harmonies with two almost joyful guitar solos mixed in. The set slowed back down with another change; instead of getting the addiction ballad "My Morphine" from 1998, we went straight into a new introspective piece, "Tennessee." To close out the set, they must have figured we need another upbeat, fun tune, so instead of a cover version of "Dusty Boxcar Wall" (a song not upbeat or fun in any way) we got an old favorite from 2001, "Red Clay Halo," about a farm boy who is covered in dirt from his chores and so the girls won't dance with him. That's okay, though: "But when I pass through the pearly gates/my crown will be gold instead./Or just a red clay robe/with red clay wings/and a red clay halo for my head."

After a brief intermission, the second set began with what might be my second-favorite track on the new record, "Hard Times." I resist writing much about the new songs because I want to save that for the eventual review, but seeing the live performance was a special thing because it started with Gillian alone, just her voice and banjo for the first verse and chorus, David stepping in with his guitar more than a full minute into the song. It was hushed and plaintive, and intimate in the way only live music can be. Another quiet tune from the new album, "Down Along the Dixie Line," followed, and then the crowd-pleaser "Elvis Presley Blues," one of the standout tracks from their 2001 album, and one of their most lyrically expressive songs with lines about Elvis like "Just a country boy, he combed his hair/put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air/and he shook it like a chorus girl/shook it like a Harlem queen/shook it like a midnight rambler, baby, like you never seen" and "How he took it all out of black and white/grabbed everyone in other hand, and held on tight/and he shook it like a hurricane/shook it like to make it break/shook it like a holy roller with his soul at stake." The fun continued with an inventive arrangement for the new track "Six White Horses," which is of course about death coming for us all, involving guitar, harmonica, voices, handclaps, and step-dancing. Seemed quite appropriate.

At the three-quarter mark in every Gillian Welch show for over a decade now sits the song that, it seems, Gillian and David have declared as their magnum opus, a brilliantly written and structured track called "Revelator" which gave their third album its name. I love how, on the setlist, where most every other song gets one word of its title or its initials written, the clipped "REV" is all that serves to signify the tune. It seems like the setlist was made in its entirely, and then the song was dropped in, as if so essential, it's assumed during setlist creation and earmarked once the songs are counted and the 3/4ths place is calculated. Starting off bold and then meandering in its middle, its lyrics swoop and dive like birds, barely stringing together contrasting images and the threads of a plot long lost, the two guitars meshing in sync before a closing section where Gillian holds a minor key rhythm line while David riffs on top, crashing and thrashing, alternating between sharp, intricate notes and violently raw repeated phrases, ending at perhaps the most sour chord progression ever, as if you've been screamed at and now your antagonist, drained and half-conscious, slumps to the floor. The song is a masterpiece, and a live experience that left my hands tingling from how much I'd unconsciously been tensing them.

The crowd was wild and applauded for a long time, and Gillian and David took a moment to play with the setlist yet again. After a while Gillian came back to her mic to say "well, I suppose I'll have my partner sing one," and we were treated to "I Hear Them All," a gentle track from their side project in '09, which morphed into a rousing version of "This Land is Your Land," complete with audience participation. The sad ballad "Everything is Free" was replaced by the equally sad ballad "Annabelle," a surprise but a welcome one, since the latter song was only the second they'd played from their first album 15 years ago. "Annabelle" chronicles the death of a loved daughter. Probably figuring that was enough death and dying for the end of the set, they replaced the rape-and-murder song "Caleb Meyer" with "Look at Miss Ohio," the anthemic track which kicks off their fourth album and tells the rather Augustinian story of a gal who's "running around with the ragtop down./She says 'I wanna do right, but not right now.'" As we gave them a standing ovation, they left and returned to the stage for another new song, "The Way the Whole Thing Ends." It wasn't quite the end, however, as they chose a pair of cover songs to finish off the show, first a song they've been singing since the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack came out in 2000, "I'll Fly Away," and then a brand new cover for this tour, a powerful rendition of Jefferson Airplane's classic "White Rabbit" which brought us all to our feet once again.

Yup, I'm a firm believer in buying myself presents. I always have the most fun with them. After the tour goes through continental Europe and Great Britain in November, they stop at a theater a paltry three hours from Bluebell Town at the end of the month. Guess who just bought himself a ticket?

Homeownership, part 3: Settling In

2011-09-20T23:45:00.002-04:00

It's been over six weeks now since I bought my house, and because I've started automatically referring to it as "my house" instead of "the house" I'd say that means I've settled in. As always, each day is a learning process; for example, a few weeks ago I learned that my sump pump wasn't designed to handle the amount of rainfall a tropical storm brings. The hilarious part is that instead of short-circuiting and dying, it short-circuited and refused to turn off unless the plug was pulled. However, since the sinkhole was refilling to the top with rainwater within 20 minutes, I decided not to pull the plug. (Good call, there.) I then listened to the pump working nonstop for over 3 days until a replacement could be found and installed - when I called my parents to tell them the news sometime on day 2, they simply laughed at me and said "Welcome to homeownership!" Truthfully, I'm not complaining about any of this - with the devastation the remnant of Irene caused to my state - yes, "my state," - I feel very lucky to have escaped with 3 days of noise pollution and spending $100 for a new sump pump. With so many having lost crops, businesses, livelihoods, and homes to the floodwaters, and Bluebell Town didn't even lose electricity, I'm more grateful than I can express. It will be a long recovery for our state, though the outpouring of support by local and federal government has been swift and wonderful.

Oddly enough, while all this has been happening, I've been reading Alexis de Tocqueville's gargantuan book, Democracy in America. It was the last of those 16 books I committed to reading this summer, the books which have been on my to-read list for many years. It was illuminating to read his words, such as these, while watching their truth in action all around me:

"When an American calls for the cooperation of those like him, it is rare indeed that they refuse it to him, and I often observed that they spontaneously afforded it with great zeal. Should some unforseen accident come upon a public road, they come running from all around - whoever the victim may be; should some great unforseen misfortune strike a family, the purses of a thousand strangers open up without trouble; modest but very numerous gifts come to its assistance in its misery. ... Americans, who are always cold in their manner and often coarse, almost never show themselves insensitive, and if they do not hasten to offer services, they do not refuse to provide them. ... At the same time that equality of conditions makes men feel their independence, it shows them their weakness; they are free but exposed to a thousand accidents, and experience is not slow to teach them that although they do not have a habitual need of assistance from others, some moment almost always arrives when they cannot do without it."

Tocqueville has much to say which is often quoted and often true about the limits of American democracy, its preoccupations with money and with mediocrity, but throughout his book are also very true and very rarely quoted aspects of what he finds admirable about American government, society, and culture. Though it's been a slog getting through it all, and he really could have used a team of editors helping him say what he wanted to say in fewer pages, it's one of those occurrences a literature major like me lives for: a moment when an author and a volume say in expressible, cogent language, something true in 1840 which remains true over 170 years later, not only in facts, but in experience; not only in a book of historical commentary but also when you look out the window.

I've slightly strayed from my original topic. This happens a lot.

I've bought towel racks for the kitchen and bath towels for the bathroom; a new showerhead and a new bed, this latter to be delivered tomorrow with a new sofa and loveseat. I own a lawnmower for the first time - heck, I own a lawn for the first time. Land as property: it's a fascinating thought. And you'll laugh, as you should, but I've been in bed at night thinking about land as property and its implications philosophical and practical. Don't worry, it's not a habitual thing I do, but it's nice to be thinking new thoughts brought on by owning a home. I've taken saws and clippers and trimmers to the yard: those two red pricker bushes are chopped down, their branches broken into pieces and delivered triumphantly to the town dump. Other branches and shrubs and weeds will follow, until the snow starts to fly. I've discovered that although I don't share it, I begin to understand the subculture of American men who spend long Saturday mornings in hardware stores and Home Depot, weighing merits of gas vs. electric edge trimmers and types of sprinkler systems (stationary, oscilating, pulsating, rotary, traveling). They wear faded baseball caps and jeans, often with a paint smear or two in places. They have questions about grass seed. These aren't life or death questions, and they know this, but they are anxious about the answers.

Because no matter where you live, people judge you on what the outside of your home looks like. Though we have no streelamps and few sidewalks and my neighborhood is not the suburbs, as I've mentioned before, there's still foot traffic going by when you're outside on a fine autumn weekend afternoon chopping pricker bushes down. Literally three people from the neighborhood at large stopped to thank me; apparently the previous owner was not thought of as, in one neighbor's words, "someone who understood how to take care of a yard." One of my nearest neighbors came over to introduce himself and talk about the drainage ditch the town installed which divides our properties; I found him a courteous and lively older gentleman and gladly spent a half-hour in conversation with him. (It would serve me right, of course, if after my post on my neighbors in the old apartment I found neighbors here who were actually enjoyable to live near.) I've trimmed back the branches which overhang the slim sidewalk I do have on one side of the house; two women who run together daily through our neighborhood slowed their pace and shouted a thank-you to me. The house already has its number on the outside, but the mailbox is bare and I keep forgetting to pick up those stickable numerals, but one day I'll remember. My parents sent up a box full of extra pads for the bottom of chairs and furniture they didn't use when they added the wood floor to their house. I still can't find bookcases I like enough with to buy, and my books and DVDs are all in neat stacks on the third room's floor. Various friends have been by to see the place and one laughed and said I should mess them up into one huge pile and swim through them like Uncle Scrooge. And I'm tempted to.

More than anything else so far, it's been borne in on me that the desire for a private space, a personal and owned space, is real, and deep-seated. It doesn't need to be big; my house is barely 1,300 square feet and I feel like a king. It doesn't need much ornamentation; I like the sparseness of most all of my rooms and plan to keep them sparse. I have been floored by the number and variety of home furnishings catalogs I get in the mail, a large majority addressed to the previous owner and very few to "current resident." I tend to get 3-5 of them a week, and the downside of owning a home is becoming clearer to me. Inside, with these catalogs from far-flung outfitters, and outside with the size and variety of things you can do to your land and house courtesy of the big box stores, it's the subtle seductions of envy, and possessiveness, and gluttony. The various "hoarders" shows on cable TV are startling and sad; only in the past month have I come to understand that they show another truth of American culture which Tocqueville well understood:

"It is not a question to build vast palaces, of vanquishing and outwitting nature, of depleting the universe in order better to satiate the passions of a man; it is about adding a few roods to one's fields, planting an orchard, enlarging a residence, making life easier and more comfortable at each instant, preventing inconvenience, and satisfying the smallest needs without effort and almost without cost. These objects are small, but the soul clings to them: it considers them every day and from very close; in the end they hide the rest of the world from it, and they sometimes come to intervene between the world and heaven."

And I should say, while I've realized that desire exists to have a private and owned space, it's also not a mandatory need. I've known people who've lived their lives as renters or who have lived with family members without owning where they live, and been quite happy and content. I can't honestly say I know whether I would be happy in that situation; maybe yes, maybe no. Either way the felt need isn't essential, but having it fulfilled is very nice. Much of what we call freedom in America is the ability to make numerous choices, from numerous options, which determine not only a fair share of the larger goals we pursue and our achievements over a lifetime but also quite a lot, if not more, of our daily habits and preferences, without coercion by, or fear of punishment from, our government specifically and our society generally. It can be easily seen how homeownership is not a prerequisite, or a natural end, of the American idea of freedom, though it can be a means through which this type of freedom is partially acquired. Certainly many have done and do so, as I hope to do as well.

I'm looking forward in a rather unreasonable way to my new furniture being delivered tomorrow. This could be the beginning of the end.

I'm tempted to say, as a buffer between me and consumerism, "at least I'm reading Tocqueville," but truthfully, much of what he has to say is common sense and further conclusions drawn from such sense, and though many of our best books involve authors who speak common sense, that's never stopped people from ignoring such things, which I may well do. There's more than a few people in this world who, in high school and college, I looked at and said "surely I'll never be like them." Now I look at those people, and former friends who have become very like those people, and say "oh dear, Lord please help me not become like them." My own agency in the matter is far more suspect these days.

To end this post on a more upbeat note, I also wanted to give an update on what my agency has accomplished over the summer re: my list of summer projects. Though buying my house hadn't been a sure thing when I formed the list this summer, I knew it was a strong possibility and would curtail some of what I wanted to do, though I mean that in the best sense. For example, those 16 books did get read, but I'm still finishing the last and here we are 2/3rds through September. I did recreate a druid in World of Warcraft in order to relearn that character class and revisit some areas I played through on my first WoW character five years ago, but Reascarl (Reece for short) is at level 30, lower than I'd expected. I'll keep her around and probably level her slowly. My other gaming goal, to play Portal 2, didn't even get started. My poetry goals ended up more mediocre than I'd hoped; I wrote first drafts of 8 new poems but haven't done any revising on them, though I did work through revising a larger poem which had stymied me for quite a while. I did push my way through listening to the full 6-disc "Jazz" compilation recently released by Smithsonian Folkways, but I must report jazz remains background music to me, something to listen to while something else is going on. Though many of the musicians made interesting music, it was also fleeting music; I couldn't get into the compositions much, complex though they were, and their melodies didn't linger the way they must for music to sink into me.

Lastly, as I expected, I didn't get to all 97 of the movies I'd wanted to revisit for various reasons. I watched 35 of them, a little more than one third. The rest I may or may not get to as desire dictates; as a project in itself I feel no compulsion to actually finish it. In a less-than-shocking newsflash, just like last summer when I rewatched my best-of list, most of the opinions I'd garnered 5, 10, or 15 years ago when I saw the movies the first time came right back to me. There were exceptions both ways: Klute became hopelessly cheesy in the interim; Blade Runner less impressive; Singles more comprehensible and funny after more relationship experience on my part; A Hard Day's Night more vivacious; A River Runs Through It more sublime. I'd forgotten how good Chinatown's script is, and how mesmerizing Jack Nicholson once was as an actor. I was sad to see The Manchurian Candidate lose resonance for me apart from a few specific scenes. Badlands, All About Eve, Heat, Lost in Translation, The Last Picture Show, and Wonder Boys all remained quality films and highly enjoyable. After the superhero movie renaissance we went through, Unbreakable felt awkward and poorly paced, though the story was still memorable. I only fell in love once, but what a way to go: Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco, passingly interesting to me the first time around, acquired the force of truth a decade later. As luck would have it, his first movie since, called Damsels in Distress, has been completed and was just screened during the Toronto International Film Festival. Unfortunately, while it has a distributor, there's no plans yet to release it in the U.S., and most of the reviews it got at TIFF amounted to the reviewers clearly wanting to coax good reviews out of themselves and cheering him for giving it the old college try. And then one reviewer ended by saying "As delayed, superfluous-in-hindsight sequels go, it's his Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." This fills me with the chic angst I enjoy watching in Whit Stillman films but don't like so much when it's real life.

And if that's what I'm calling an upbeat way to end, I think it's time for bed.

Harry Potter 7b

2011-09-07T23:58:00.002-04:00

Though it feels like I recapped the first seven Harry Potter movies a long time ago, it's only been about six weeks. Other things have been on my mind and my to-do list. It also took me a whie to put together what I wanted to talk about because, frankly, the last movie was altogether much of what I expected - apart from one huge flaw in my own reasoning. The pacing of 7a was such that I thought we'd get a continued slowburn for 7b, but that was completely wrong, and if I'd thought more about the way Rowling structures book 7, I would have realized it ahead of watching the last movie: after a brief opening interlude at Shell Cottage, the last twelve chapters zip at a breakneck pace, with pauses only around Snape's and Harry's deaths. So the last movie is similarly paced, which likely pleased most who found 7a too slow.

However, since the film is basically a series of action sequences, there's very little character development apart from a few secondary characters (Neville and Draco), and of course for Harry's coming to realize the extent of who Snape is. The succession of Snape's memories as presented through the Pensieve is perhaps the strongest section of the movie. That Harry collects these memories through Snape's tears instead of the usual way is, I'd argue, a key for understanding who Snape is and the part he's played in Harry's life for longer than Harry realizes. (And in the book, the "silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid" came from his mouth and ears as well as his eyes, and Rowling never describes it as tears.) Much was made, when book 7 came out, of Harry's resurrection, but if you want a Christ-figure who fits the role better, despite not coming back from the dead, Snape is your guy. That said, the whole section involving Harry's walking into the forest; the resurrection stone and talking with his parents, Sirius, and Lupin; his death at Voldemort's hand; and the conversation with Dumbledore somewhere that looks like King's Cross station (some nicely done symbolism in multiple ways on Rowling's part) is filmed with care and makes use of some great cinematography. The forest, for example, had never looked so drab to me before, the aural background sounds almost deadened. There's some excellent blocking as Harry speaks with the spirits. Most impressively, from the wide "establishing" shots which actually destabilize the frame, to the strong use of lighting to evoke placelessness, the fetus-shaped and withered "soul" of Tom Riddle, and the pov shots from Harry's perspective which actually ground the viewer, the King's Cross sequence is in many ways a textbook example of how to make the purely imaginative believable.

The sequence is certainly more visually memorable than the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort, but unlike those who criticized the latter as not flashy enough, I actually liked how the showdown and Voldemort's death was handled, for two reasons. Firstly, it has to be remembered that Rowling has taken the reader on a predominantly emotional journey in the last chapters of book 7, after a long physical journey in the majority of the book. I'll still argue that the film of 7a captures that journey better than Rowling does, but 7b takes Rowling at her word and the final moments of our main antagonists sinply happen: Harry just dies at Voldemort's Killing Curse in the forest (as did Cedric in book/film 4); Voldemort's Killing Curse rebounds on him as the Elder Wand shifts its loyalty to Harry, its rightful owner, and he disintigrates. That the film uses a shimmering white substance - snow? sand? skin? - floating away on the wind is actually rather good, something silent and even peaceful. But it is still simple and bare: Voldemort just dies. No pyrotechnics (e.g. his attack on Harry in Hagrid's motorcycle in 7a), no roars of powerful magic (think of the duel between Voldemort and Dumbledore in the Ministry at the end of book/film 5), not even a peal of thunder and the natural elements in turmoil (like the restoration of Voldemort at the graveyard in book/film 4). Granted, the film doesn't do what the book does, with its 6+ pages of dialogue between Harry and Voldemort before they fight, but when the moment comes, Rowling puts Voldemort's death into a single paragraph of five sentences. Both she and the filmmakers understand that death, whenever it happens, happens at a moment. Drawn-out, slow-motion death throes are often mocked in movies because of their unreality; even moreso in books. Rowling and the filmmakers are right to present both Harry and Voldemort's deaths as they do.

Secondly, it's simply a good surprise for an audience; who expected that kind of end, really, for Voldemort in a big-budget action movie? It's entirely possible I'm the only reviewer who will ever bring the '80s teen vampire flick The Lost Boys into a discussion of Harry Potter, but when it comes to death scenes that movie is more instructive for storytelling than you'd think. Early in the narrative the protagonists are told that you never really know how a vampire will die: some melt, or dissipate, or explode; some die without a sound. And the ostensible leader of the vampire clan does indeed just curl up and die and that's it. Of course, then the protagonists find out he wasn't really the leader, just the second-in-command, and the leader basically causes an earthquake when he's killed... but you get the point. Underplaying the expected climax can be very effective.

As with most good action films, 7b has some nicely done funny moments, usually one-liners or visual gags, and this will please those who found 7a too stark for their taste. As the romantic humor breaks up the tension in film 6, so the quips and gags offer needed catharsis during the battle scenes. Matthew Lewis as Neville gets more than a fair share of these, and excels with them; I was also quite happy to see Neville and Luna together by the end of the film, and that they're presented in a simultaneously awkward and tender moment is pitch perfect. Actually, with Neville's coming of age in rallying the DA while Harry & Co. have been away, and his killing of Nagini in the Battle of Hogwarts, it would have been nice if film 5 had included a little more than a throwaway line about the possibility that he, not Harry, was the subject of Trelawney's prophecy. Ron and Hermione get some good comedy monents as well; their first kiss, in the Chamber of Secrets after Hermione destroys the cup Horcrux is hilarious and well-earned. Though I can't believe Rowling passed up the opportunity to show Hermione destroying the horcrux; in the book she and Ron relate the story to Harry after it's happened. Most of the fighting scenes are also well-earned, especially the Tower sequence, McGonagall's whupping of Snape, and Molly becoming a mama bear against Bellatrix. (There's another good indication, in my opinion, that some people haven't really thought through the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort; Bellatrix has a death scene, set up cinematically as a one-two punch at Molly's hands; Voldemort's death has to be both simpler and weightier than that.)

Helena Bonham-Carter once again steals the show, especially in her brilliant performance as Hermione-pretending-to-be-Bellatrix at Gringotts. While the bank and vault sequence was nicely done, I didn't get much out of the dragon, though the special effects were fine enough. I think I've just seen dragons done much better in other visual contexts. No big deal, though. However, the effects used in the destruction of Hogwarts are quite effective, and in some cases emotionally charged; that the main battle happens there and the castle is largely destroyed by it is entirely fitting. It was disappointing to not see the Ravenclaw digs, or have Alecto and Amycus Carrow as actual baddies; if I remember correctly we see them but they don't even get any lines. On the other hand, the fight/rescue with Draco and his cronies in the Room of Requirement was very satisfying, as was the pointed departure of the Malfoys, at Cissy's command, from the ranks of the Death-Eaters. (My friend Pinky writes an insightful analysis of that change from Rowling's text in a review here; her thoughts on Snape are likewise worth reading.)

I also found the changes made to the Grey Lady and her interaction with Harry well considered, though I should also admit Kelly Macdonald has been a favorite of mine ever since the original "State of Play" series, so perhaps I'm biased. The aftermath of the battle is also treated well, with very little dialogue and again a focus on Harry's perspective, as the Weasleys and others grieve their lost family and friends. The obligatory explanation-after-it's-all-over scene is mercifully short, as Harry explains to Hermione and Ron how the Elder Wand was his instead of Snape's, and then breaks it in half, a much more satisfying denouement than in the book, where he returns it to Dumbledore's tomb. The epilogue scene is also treated well, though inexplicably there's no glance shared between Harry & Co. and Draco in the film, which I had especially liked in the book.

A friend commented to me that it's too bad there won't be more Harry Potter films (or books) but I would have to disagree. For me, these seven books and eight films are enough. I've enjoyed them and the world they've created, and I'm sure I'll revisit them again someday, but usually the best things we have in books and cinema and other media are made better by coming to a close, by having a moment of "the end" where the book is shut and film stops. That all seven books were made into films, with the same cast, in the course of a decade is a remarkable achievement in Hollywood to begin with; that the films are, in my opinion, by and large quality entertainment and reasonably faithful to the strengths of their source material is the mark of a job well done by the entire roster of cast and crew. There will of course be box sets and "extended versions" (the latter already exist for films 1 & 2), and the Hollywood machine will seek to squeeze as much money from every stone they can grab. That's par for the course. The art in itself is the achievement, what should be celebrated and what will remain. Nox.

Homeownership, part 2: The Story

2011-08-19T23:31:00.005-04:00

The story of buying the house begins a year and a half ago, in the spring of 2010 when I was promoted to a librarian position at Bluebell. The job was not only salaried, but involved a very nice bump in salary which I had to figure out what to do with. I ended up deciding to live on 60% of my salary and put the rest into savings. This decision meant I was actually living on less money than I did while I worked in Circulation, but although it meant some belt-tightening, I was pleased to see the savings build up. I wasn’t starting from zero, but didn’t have a large starting point, as I’d been channeling an amount of money into stocks. I stopped doing this and focused everything on savings. Still, the plan wasn’t to buy a house in 2011. I was intending to live on 60% of my salary for two years, and start house-hunting in the spring of 2012, partly because I was counting on the housing market to still be in a slump then (which seems to continue to be a good bet) and because by that point I was hoping to be able to afford a down payment of 20% on a house near the top of my intended price range. Other than needing to buy a new laptop (which was expected) and get some car repairs done (unexpected; aren’t they always?) during the past 18 months, nothing specifically conspired to derail my savings plan, the way the world tends to do whenever anyone tries to save money for anything. So that was nice.

Bluebell has a staff newsletter which includes a classifieds section, and I tend to read through that pretty regularly. Around Eastertime, I was surprised to see a friend’s name and email associated with a for-sale listing; Quadratic is a faculty member at Bluebell in the math department and lived a minute’s walk from my apartment. It was amazing to me that he would selling his very nice and very quirky house, so I emailed him to ask what was up. It turns out he and his girlfriend had decided to get married. She was moving in with him, and it wasn’t his house they were selling, but hers. Before getting a realtor and listing the home publicly, they’d decided to try advertising to the college community first. He invited me to go take a look at it, and I said sure: I wasn’t really looking for a house at the time, but hey, why not? A few days later I went over and met Annatto, his fiancée, and toured her house, which she’d lived in since 1989 and was built in 1981. The house (as you’ve seen in the photos) was small but cozy, almost tucked away, ideal for one or two people. The neighborhood was definitely residential, but not exactly suburban, on a side road which branched to other side roads but also ended in a cul-de-sac. The main road it connected to was a local route which went from the center of Bluebell Town through a stretch of lightly developed lands to the next town over, with small residential sections in between broken up by farms, fields, and an apple orchard. The positioning seemed almost perfect to me: not quite in town but walking distance from it, not quite among the fields and farms but a short drive away, neighbors within shouting distance but not close enough to see inside windows. Or rather, one neighbor close enough to see inside windows, but there were also tall pine trees along the property line to block the sightlines.

The house itself was the strongest selling point, especially in its small size but also in its upkeep and general condition. Annatto had replaced the roof, updated all the windows, and put in gorgeous cherry wood flooring throughout the house (minus the bathroom, which had tile) only three years ago. The vinyl siding was only a decade old and still in great condition. The foundation was strong and well-reinforced; half the basement was finished. Because Bluebell Town is on the south end of a long valley, most of it is, while not in a flood plain, below the water table; this means anyone with a basement has to guard against water incursions. But the basement had a well-maintained sump pump and Annatto had had water in the basement exactly once in the 20+ years she’d lived there. (To swing the pendulum the other way, my old apartment building, even with a built-in drainage system and sump pump, gets flooded or partially flooded at least 2-3 times a year. There’s nothing quite like doing your laundry with the washer and dryer units themselves surrounded by an inch of water.) The heating system in the house, while old, still worked quite well, and was your standard oil heat. (Most everyone here is on oil or propane; for as environmentally conscious as most people here are, there’s very few natural gas lines into and around my state, which is too bad.) There was the propane fireplace, as already mentioned, and of course electricity to keep pilot lights lit and plugs working. So, three energy bills isn’t my favorite thing ever, but it’s workable for right now. Not a day goes by I don’t consider ripping the fireplace out of the wall, but we’ll see how useful it is in the winter. There’s central vac as well, a perk which initially didn’t mean much to me, but is useful.

Pretty much by the end of that first afternoon, I knew the house would be a great one for me. So I pursued it, slowly at first, but as things went along it became clear that there were few surprises about its condition and upkeep; Annatto had done a good job caring for it overall, and had represented it well to me. Additionally, I liked the idea of buying it from her because of my friendship with Quadratic, whom I’ve known for a few years now and found a consistently sensible, reasonable person with more humility than the average Bluebell professor. Of course, there were and are a few drawbacks, one of them more major than I had realized at first. I mentioned before how Annatto’s aesthetic sense didn’t quite match my own, concerning the yellow walls, for example. The difference in our attitudes towards the yard, its contents and care, is even more pronounced, and frankly she’s allowed some serious damage to the flora and fauna.

Looking at the clues to be seen, a combination of preservationist ideologies and practical laziness seems to have been her general attitude. The various bushes and flowers, clearly selected piecemeal, not only don’t mesh well together, but have been allowed to grow wild. Daylilies planted in erratic clumps throughout the yard, and a batch of ferns near the side entrance, are both tender types of plants to begin with. But by the day I’d moved in, they’d obviously been neglected for some time and were quite dead. As you can see in the photo of the front lawn, a giant overgrown bush with beautiful white flowers sits to the left of the front steps, while two giant bushes with deep red branches and small red flowers are on the right. While very pretty individually, the overall effect only looks attractive if you’re designing the place for the Queen of Hearts, in Wonderland. Moreover, the two huge red bushes have prickers, or rather needles, literally an inch long each, every 2-3 inches on the branches. The lawn is at least half clover or weeds, with a dry culvert at the front of the yard which I deliberately excised from my outdoor pictures, because it was overgrown with weeds and tall grasses almost as high as myself. (To solve this problem for the present my father, bless his destructive heart, took a hedge trimmer to the culvert and razed them to the ground.) There are several large trees on the property, but a few of them have fungus or root rot problems which were never addressed; at least three have to be ripped out entirely because they’re clearly dying, while several others have to be cut back and pruned because, even though they’re deciduous trees, their branches have been allowed to grow so much, several literally touch the ground.

Finally, on three out of the house’s four sides, there’s several weed clusters which have grown up naturally among the actual flowers and flowering shrubs (just like in the parable in Matthew 13) and are so entangled, they may not be able to be taken out without removing the flowers. The backyard contains two relatively small tree stumps which were cut many years ago, but the stumps were never removed and are rotting. There’s also a very alive weed tree at the left front corner of the house. If it’s allowed to continue growing, the roots will destroy that corner of the house’s foundation. So to undersell the point, there’s a lot of work to be done in the yard. However, the total land is only 0.3 of an acre, nice and small, what I wanted. I don’t mind putting money into the property to make it healthy again, and the good thing is that it doesn’t need to all be done at once. The various other drawbacks, things like some beat-up heat registers and a screen door which doesn’t close all the way, I can take care of in the next few months. And a few random other things like a leaky showerhead and cupboards which were emptied but not cleaned, are things I’ve already addressed. But overall, apart from the yard, there’s no major work which needs to be done on the house, making it pretty easy for me to, over the past three weeks, just move in and figure out where all my stuff goes and start getting settled.

I’ve jumped ahead in my general story and now I’ll go back: when in late May I told Annatto and Quadratic that I was definitely interested in moving forward, they told me there had been interest from another college staffer but it hadn’t been as intent as mine, and they felt I was more organized in any case, so they were pleased to move forward with me on the sale. And the house, after the inspection and appraisal and some negotiating with Annatto over price, ended up appraised well below the high end of my price range, and I paid 6K less than that. However, because it was a year earlier than I’d planned, I still needed to ask my parents for help with the down-payment, which they very graciously gave me. Part of the plan of waiting two years was to not have to ask my parents for any money, but letting some pride go is usually a good thing for me. I sold some stocks as well, which had always been part of the plan, and over 20% of the down-payment came from money I’ve made in the market over the past three years.

The one stipulation Annatto had was that she wanted to stay in the house through July, which was fine with me, as it gave me extra time to pack, and to save a little more cash for a cushion. My landlord, however, proved far less easy to please, and initially wanted to hold me to my year-long lease, which I had signed in late March, well in advance of even knowing about the house’s existence. The “deal” he offered me was that I’d only have to pay the lease if he couldn’t rent the apartment to someone else before it ended. This was of course no deal at all, as it’s illegal to charge two different tenants for the same apartment at the same time, so he wasn’t offering me anything by saying I’d only pay until he found another tenant. We haggled some after that. Then he offered to amend the lease to expire at the end of September, knowing I’d be moving in August and, I imagine, wanting to screw me just a little bit if he couldn’t screw me a lot. From having this landlord for seven years I knew I wouldn’t be getting a better deal, so I agreed. It’s not that he imagines himself a wheeler-dealer, it’s just that he seems completely indifferent to anyone’s interests save his own. I’ve seen him cheat other tenants out of services he said he’d provide, or delay repairs he said he’d make until they had moved out (and never actually make the repairs). Meanwhile when an apartment turned over, he’d raise the rent indiscriminately, because he could get away with it; at one point, the apartment under mine, exactly the same as mine in all respects, was renting for $160 more per month than my own rent, just because he kept raising it every time someone moved out. In any case, I knew there would be an uphill battle on extracting myself from my renting situation cleanly. I was thankful for only having to pay rent through September, but to be honest, still expected another shoe to drop at some point.

The various processes involved with buying a house proceeded: lawyers were hired (first time I’ve had to do that), inspectors were inspecting, appraisers were appraising, a veritable 12 days of Christmas with the different people involved. I had two excellent loan officers at my local bank who were invaluable, and my lawyer distinguished himself by getting back to me, regardless of my query, the same day I asked it. A Purchase & Sales form was signed, unofficial offers of payment were made and accepted, followed by official offers made and accepted. Financing was worked out, including an exception which was made at Bluebell for me to take advantage of a reduced interest rate on half of my mortgage for as long as I continue to work for the college, which was a shot in the dark on my part and a real blessing – it’s a benefit open to someone in my job, but only after 4 years, and while I’ve been a college employee for 7, I’ve only been in this job for a little over a year. My boss, her boss, and our Dean all vouched to college administration on my behalf, and I’m very grateful.

Meanwhile I was tackling my apartment and throwing things out (why on earth did I still have my broken stand-alone CD burner from 2005, for example), giving other things away (like a hideous bookcase a friend of mine actually liked and wanted), and packing up the rest in Amazon boxes large and small I’ve been saving since grad school, which is when I learned how annoying moving is without enough boxes. By the week before the closing, I’ve got anything that isn’t furniture or necessary for day-to-day living packed up and in my second bedroom, and I’ve also got some nosy neighbors who are wondering what the all noise is about. (By the way, if you’re keeping track of these things, the guy who freaked out about the landing windows staying closed ignored that issue once summer started, but suddenly decided in early July that the cellar door should remain open at all times and kept leaving it wide, swinging in front of another tenant’s apartment door, whenever he entered or left the building.) So, the closing will be on Monday August 1; it’s Friday, July 29. I get a frantic email from my loan officer, saying she and Annatto’s lawyer have been trying to contact Annatto for figures on the water/sewer proration for the house in July which she was supposed to have gotten from the town’s water department, and we can’t have the closing without it. No one can find her. I try too, and no luck. She eventually leaves a message on my cell: she had decided to go away for a long weekend before the closing and thought everything had been taken care of. The closing gets delayed from Monday morning to Monday afternoon so Annatto and her lawyer can get the figures from the town offices. Fun times.

But once we’re all around a table together at the bank on Monday afternoon, everything goes smoothly and after 90 minutes, I’ve signed my name twenty-three times on various documents, thousands and thousands (and thousands) of dollars have vanished from my bank account, and I hold in my hand one of those stretchy key rings, like a hair scrunchy, with my house keys on it. I allow myself one congratulatory visit to the house, just walking around, touching things, singing under my breath, and then it’s time to change into work clothes and start bringing over boxes. Our local U-Haul branch office is half U-Haul, half candy store (yes, really; while I was waiting for the owner to compute what kind of truck he could get me and when, I was checking out the 15 different kinds of malted milk balls they had in stock). It turned out that I couldn’t rent a truck until the following Monday. So, fine, I spend the week moving the boxes, which were considerable.

On August 4th, four days after I closed on the house, my landlord calls to inform me that he was going to start repainting my apartment the following morning because he assumed I was completely moved out. He wasn’t happy when I told him about the U-Haul situation, and got very unhappy when I reminded him that I had already paid all of August’s rent and technically could take the entire month to move. There was more haggling, and eventually he agreed to not come to paint until he talks again with me on Tuesday to see how the U-Haul went and if the furniture is moved by then. I hang up the phone and it suddenly strikes me that I know exactly how this is going to play out. Have you ever worked for a passive-aggressive boss, or had dealings with a passive-aggressive person who perceived themselves in a position of authority over you? I worked for that kind of boss for three years not that long ago, and the lessons I learned popped into my head. Throughout the weekend I stepped up my moving, getting as much as I could out of the apartment. On Monday, I picked up the U-Haul and my parents arrived to help with the furniture, and over that day and the next, we moved beds and furniture and did a bunch of cleaning. Thankfully there were no heart attacks. They left Tuesday and I made another trip to the apartment to gather some smaller things, leftovers really, and by the end of Tuesday the only things still there were some extra boxes and cleaning supplies in the kitchen, and the only thing left to clean was the kitchen itself.

Tuesday evening, I received an email from my landlord, and it said exactly what I thought it would say. There was no conversation, no request involved; he would be arriving the following morning to start repainting, and would put dropcloths over whatever I hadn’t yet moved, but this was the way it had to be and he thanked me for understanding. I wonder what his reaction was when he walked in the door and found I’d understood all too well. A few nights later I went back, took away the extra boxes, and cleaned the kitchen. He had indeed started painting, and I left his equipment alone. So I left, assuming I was completely moved out. Early Monday morning I get an email from my landlord, expressing his hope that I’ve used the weekend to clean the bathroom and kitchen. I wrote back: the bathroom had been cleaned earlier in the week and the kitchen later in the week. All set. Over the next four days, which is this past week, I get multiple emails and phone messages from him, at first requesting and then demanding I come back and clean the bathroom and kitchen, which he claimed were dirty. And there’s our other shoe. Previous tenants had warned me that he might use various things as a pretext for keeping my deposit, as he had done with them; one of them hadn’t cleaned the bathroom to his specifications and so her deposit was kept. At first I repeated that I had indeed cleaned the entire apartment before leaving, but as the days went by and it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop harassing me, I decided to go over Thursday night, late enough that I was sure he wouldn’t be there painting, and I cleaned the specific things he found problems with again (which weren't dirty, of course; I'd cleaned them once already). Before I left, I taped my apartment key and spare key to a note, then went home and emailed him to tell him I had gone back to clean, that I trusted this second cleaning was satisfactory, and to that end, my keys were in the apartment for him to pick up, as I wouldn’t been needing them again.

The kicker: there’s been no response whatever from him since, not even an acknowledgment of my email. One of the things which fascinates me about passive-aggressive people is their need to antagonize. As the repeated communication from him had been to needle and goad me, so now this non-communication is likely intended to needle and goad me. I encountered the same thing in my old boss, and I feel like I understand it without understanding it, if that makes sense. It’s like we’re opponents in some weird way, and the passive-aggressive person permits themselves to get angry, but the other person is not permitted, and if they do, an elaborate victim/martyr routine is the response. And eventually the conversation ends, but only on the passive-aggressive person's terms; they have to have the final word, which is usually a non-word, ie. usually a brush-off. If it wasn’t as frustrating as it is to deal with, I’d be interested in the psychology behind it. As it is, hopefully all the shoes have dropped and I’ll get soaked for rent in September without living there, and then life will go on. Maybe he'll keep my deposit, maybe he won't. Sometimes it’s worth wasting money to keep the high ground.

To end on a happier note, here's some things I've learned in the past three weeks:

Living on a street corner has its pros and cons; on the one hand, I hear more cars driving by, but on the other, there’s a town bus stop on the opposite corner, which is quite handy.

When Mormons gather for Sunday worship, they are an exceedingly quiet people, which endears them to me.

The surrounding neighborhood provides lots of meandering roads for long evening walks. The only drawback: almost no sidewalks or streetlights!

I’m way too picky about bookcases. At this rate the books and DVDs are going to sit on the floor of the third room for months.

Adequate closet space is the most undervalued yet essential things in a house. I never knew this before now because I’ve never had adequate closet space before now.

I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have my own washer and dryer. I’m giddy. I did laundry at 11pm a few days after moving in and not only did no one complain about having to hear the noise when they were trying to sleep, the dryer actually dried my jeans and towels completely. It was domestic bliss.

The realization hits me each night as I lie in bed that I’m falling asleep in my own house, and that’s so satisfying.

Homeownership, part 1: Pictures

2011-08-05T18:02:00.004-04:00

So, the big secret over the past few months is that I've been in the process of buying a house, here in Bluebell Town. I know you want to hear the whole story, but more than that you want to see pictures, so we'll start with those:

The outside of the house is, for me, the least attractive thing about it. Then again, there's part of me which likes its nondescriptness. All the better for hiding away. I do really like that it's a ranch. (Click pictures for bigger sizes.)

So, standing at the road's edge in the front yard, here's what's across the street: Bluebell Town's Mormon church. Convenient in case I ever decide to convert.

Turn left, and here's that part of my street, with my gravel driveway in the foreground. A paved driveway is on my wish list.

Turn right, and here's the other part. I live on the corner to another side street:

If the neighborhood feels sparse and secluded, it should. If you went down that side street you'd get into real suburbs, interlocking streets with houses in even rows with picket fences and everything. But around my place the houses are farther apart and the church takes up quite a bit of land between the building, parking lot, and wide lawns on three of its four sides. Yet I'm a 3-minute drive and 15-minute walk from the center of town. The location and neighborhood were both huge draws for me.

Let's go in, shall we? The front steps are slowly rotting and falling apart, so the side door is really the primary entrance:

Standing in the doorway, here's the kitchen and living room, turning right to left:

That's about 50% of my stuff (in terms of items, not size), in boxes. Half of which is books. The first half of my books. So yes, about 50% of my total earthly possessions are books. This pleases me greatly. The black box at the far left is the propane fireplace (you can see the tank peeking out from behind the tall bushes in the photo of the side entrance), which the previous owner loved and seriously considered taking with her. I actually wish she had; to me it's a rather frivolous purchase taking up the space where my huge plasma flat-screen TV should be. Then again, I could always hang that on the wall above the fireplace. Of course, after buying a house, who has the money for a huge TV? Not this guy.

As you can see, the wood floors are awesome, but the yellow walls are meh. In the late afternoon, with the setting sun, the whole inside turns a dull orange, which isn't particularly attractive. (As I've been moving in, it's become clearer to me how little my aesthetics overlap with the previous owner's; "sunshiney" is a word she used to describe her style, which made me cringe.) No worries: nothing some paint can't fix.

The above is what I'm calling "the third room" until I figure out what it's going to be. In the first living room photo, see the front door there? There's a doorframe to the right, outside the photo, and that's where the third room is. There had been a physical door there, which the previous owner removed, which I do like, because it opens up the possibilities of what the room could be. Could be a guest room, could be a reading room, could be a workroom, could be a TV room, could be a combination of things. It also opens onto the hallway, but with an actual door, so with that door closed it's this little nook off of the living room and separate from the rest of the house.

The hallway. The first pair of doors leads to the third room on the left, and the basement on the right, with suitably scary-looking-but-sturdy stairs:

The basement has two sections: unfinished...

...and finished. I also have no idea what to do with the finished part of the cellar and will entertain suggestions from the peanut gallery. Don't think the idea of a recording studio hasn't occured to me. Sadly, almost all my musician friends now live far from Bluebell Town, my equipment is mostly a decade old at this point (ie. ancient), and audio engineering has lost some of its spark for me. So the studio idea doesn't have much going for it.

Back upstairs, the middle door in the hallway is the bathroom. Not big, but twice the size of the one in my apartment, so I'll take it!

The second and final pair of doors in the hallway are bedrooms, with the master bedroom on the right. It's the only room with wallpaper, luckily wallpaper I like.

And then the second bedroom, what will be the guest bedroom, on the left. The previous owner tweaked this room as well: she removed the sliding doors on the closet, painted the interior, and put a little table in there for her desktop computer. For myself I see this being a book nook, with some homemade shelving or something. Even if the third room becomes my library, there will likely be enough books for this space, too.

We'll walk back through the house and out the side door, which gives me a chance to show you the kitchen looking from the living room:

Then it's out onto the side stairs. Left and 180 degrees and here's the backyard. It's a postage stamp of property, which also appealed to me: I didn't want a big yard.

Then back to the stairs and a view out onto the driveway and street:

And that's my house! In our next installment I'll share the story of how I came to find and buy the place.

Recap Reviews: Harry Potter 5-7a

2011-07-31T19:13:00.013-04:00

All three films left to recap share a director, David Yates, probably the most successful director in the series to meld the young-adult adventure and mystery of the books with interesting filmmaking and an even-handedness towards the darker themes of the stories which attract myself and many other adult fans. Two of the three share a screenwriter, Steve Kloves, who wrote the screenplays for all four previous films. He took a break for film 5, bringing in Michael Goldenberg, a writer with surprisingly few credits before taking on Harry Potter; then again, book 5 is so bloated and poorly written, I’d wager a first-time screenwriter could make a decent job of it. However, something in Goldenberg’s favor was the screenplay for 1997’s Contact, where he successfully turned Carl Sagan’s mumbo-jumbo into something human. Kloves resumes the writing chair for films 6 and 7a, and the break results in even better scripts for those films.

5. the Order of the Phoenix, July 2007. One thing Rowling did do correctly, and Goldenberg & Yates pick up on well, is establish from the beginning, with the dementor attack on Harry and Dudley, that Harry is fundamentally not safe anymore. Under attack from outside, and soon enough from within, not only from nightmares of Cedric’s death but Voldemort’s attempts to take advantage of the psychic link between them, Harry, already feeling isolated from his friends and teachers, withdraws further. Even the wizarding world at large is hostile or mistrustful of him; the scenes surrounding the hearing at the Ministry of Magic go on too long, but do a good job of making this point. The central struggle here, to accept the help of others and together take action, is the choice he has to make, something half-buried in Rowling’s novel. The scenes where Ron and Hermione push and plead with Harry to teach secret classes in Defense Against the Dark Arts, and then his subsequent relief and feeling of usefulness from doing so, is powerfully acted and shot. Sure, there’s loads of special effects in the Room of Requirement training scenes (and weirdly, much of the movie’s effects seem suffused with an unrealistic blue color, which doesn’t seem to have much point), but Yates smartly focuses on the characters instead.

The two newest characters with the most screen time, Dolores Umbridge and Luna Lovegood, are brilliant, and brilliantly played by Imelda Staunton and Evanna Lynch. One quibble is that, if only Goldberg and Yates had realized, something special could have done in setting up these characters as opposed to one another, not overtly or directly – they barely have any scenes together – but through a filmic device or two. Much could be made of contrasting Umbridge’s inherent paranoia and grasping for control with Luna’s naturally trusting, easygoing and intelligent nature: it’s no accident that Luna’s patronus is a rabbit. The subtlety of Luna as an echo for Harry, identifying with his new degree of being an outsider, but being quite happy regardless, is done primarily in the writing and acting, and done well. Even more impressive is the true Britishness of Umbridge; no schoolmaster from anywhere but Britain could be so primly evil. Cruel, haughty, and at bottom cowardly, some of the best scenes revolve around Umbridge, from Harry’s and later the Order’s detentions, to the Weasley twins disrupting the OWLs and throwing her into total disarray, to her hysteria at the brink of torturing Harry for information. I can offer no greater compliment concerning Umbridge to Rowling, Yates, and Goldberg than to say she is a true offspring of Dickens and Roald Dahl.

An abundance of exposition, always a thorny problem in these films, is dealt with through swooping headlines of The Daily Prophet, with ingenious use of the fact that photos in the wizarding world move and speak, letting the newspaper be both textual and visual transition. The budding romance between Harry and Cho, which frankly I could have lived without, is treated fine enough, though nothing results much from it; other than a line by Snape about using Veritaserum on her to find the Room of Requirement, Cho is unceremoniously dropped once the, ahem, important stuff starts happening. Snape himself is mostly ignored as well, save for the Occlumency lessons he gives Harry and the important flashback showing that even James Potter wasn’t always a great guy. A little more of how Snape fits/doesn’t fit into the Order would have been nice. The filmmakers rightly spend relatively little time at 12 Grimmauld Place, ancestral home of the Blacks and current hq for the Order, diminishing the storylines around pureblood issues, though not ignoring them. While the house elf storylines are ignored altogether, this was a blessed relief, though I do regret it meant there was little incentive for the statues in the Ministry to come alive at the final battle to fight Voldemort. The few scenes with the Order, showing them eager but frustrated, both with the Ministry and each other, felt right and it gave more meaning to the hopes of the next generation as they trained and struck out on their own. Though it's in retreat, the younger generation do indeed acquit themselves well in the prophecy room fight with the Death-Eaters. The arrival of the Order and ensuing battle hits the exact right notes, down to Jason Isaac’s sneers and Bellatrix killing Sirius but then almost surprised after doing it. (Helena Bonham-Carter may be typecast as a mad hatter, but for good reason; her eyes fixed in hatred and fear, with just her lower lip quivering as Harry debates killing her, is sheer mastery.) The swirls of black and white smoke as the wizards charge and battle one another are a nice touch, too.

Michael Gambon re-earns his chops as Dumbledore, after a less-convincing performance in film 4. His initial firmness and fierce defense of Harry, resulting in his gradual diminishment by Umbridge and eventual need to escape capture by the Ministry, adds a nice degree of complexity in his arrival to help Harry fight Voldemort: his confidence in literally saving Harry from Voldemort’s spells; his impotence in Harry’s internal fight against the Dark Lord’s possession. It’s seeing Ron and Hermione and remembering his love for them and for Sirius which gives Harry the strength to resist Voldemort. The shift here, with Dumbledore as powerful but flawed; or rather, human, as James Potter was, as Harry is, capable of making mistakes and poor decisions, is huge for the remainder of the series.

Best line: There’s lots of good ones to choose from, from Hermione explaining the emotional upheavals of teenage girls to Ron getting a number of good one-liners throughout the film, to Harry saying to Umbridge, as the centaurs drag her away and she wants him to tell them she doesn’t mean them any harm, that he must not tell lies. But I’ll go with the most unexpectedly touching moment, when Harry and Sirius are fighting Lucius and another Death-eater side by side. Harry disarms the second Death-eater and as Sirius is grappling with Lucius he says, quite unconsciously, “Nice one, James!”

6. the Half-Blood Prince, July 2009. While #4 is my favorite book, and #3 is likely my favorite movie, the runner-up to both would be this book and film, so Half-Blood Prince tends to get my highest overall rating taking both mediums into account. Pretty much everything until the last few scenes of film 4 are essentially kids’ movies; of the other three we’re considering here, film 5 feels very choppy overall and film 7a has great pacing, but the jury is still out until I see the last movie. Only film 6 feels altogether smooth, and develops more realistically as it goes along, especially emotionally. Where the romantic aspects of films 4 and 5 (the Yule Ball and stuff with Cho) feel rather tacked on, the romance here is more organic and ties into the overall story better and more directly. Jessie Cave does a great job of interpreting the half-child, half-harpy nature of Lavender Brown, and her scenes with Ron are invariably funny and cringeworthy at the same time. Yet I had forgotten how masterful the scene at the bottom of the staircase is, with Harry trying to comfort Hermione and the interruption by Ron and Lavender.

Bonnie Wright has always been very good as Ginny, but there’s something endearingly awkward about her and Harry dancing around one another emotionally. The filmmakers repeatedly emphasize her steadfastness and inner strength, in situations both small (the Quidditch tryouts) and big (in the marsh as Bellatrix and Fenrir attack; comforting Harry after Dumbledore’s death). Over the course of the film I grow convinced that, where it might have started as a cute little infatuation – and there’s hints of that as far back as film 2 – their relationship could be a meaningful and strong one. On the other side of things, Yates takes great care to show Draco continually alone and lonely, something I don’t quite remember Rowling capitalizing on in the novel. (It’s actually quite nice, seeing as how Draco was barely used in films 4 and 5, how much he’s a part of this film, and Tom Felton’s performance has improved immeasurably as well.) Lastly, Emma Watson nails Hermione’s slow-thaw-romantic-feelings thing towards Ron, and Rupert Grint’s doe-eyed performance as Ron under Romilda Vane’s love potion is brilliant slapstick.

From all this you will easily gather that I disagree with the critics who think the romantic subplots being given just about equal time as the main plot was ill-advised. In fact, the levity provided by them does a good job towards that smooth tone I mentioned. Think about it: film 5 is a very grim movie; Ron’s one-liners and the Weasley twins’ fireworks are so good in it mainly because they’re such a needed release from the doom and gloom. Here the balance of comic and tragic is well-considered, providing a broader palette and more complexity. In many ways this increased depth can be seen encapsulated in the character of Slughorn. As played by the great Jim Broadbent, the Potions Master is both the absent-minded professor and the man with a secret which is slowly tearing him apart inside. Which reminds me: as Snape, like Draco, has been mostly ignored in the past couple of films, he once again emerges as a crucial secondary character, and Alan Rickman steals most every scene he’s in; even the brief scenes, with no dialogue in either, as he passes Harry on his way out of the Astronomy Tower before Harry and Dumbledore go in search of the horcrux, and on his way in again as Harry is watching Dumbledore, Draco, and the Death-eaters above, are striking, filled with an intimidating presence which may or may not be on the side of good. And the calm, malice-filled way he simply says “Yes, I’m the Half-Blood Prince” to Harry is pitch-perfect. But the filmmakers did make one horrible mistake. After years of pining after the job, and with Slughorn coming on staff as Potions Master, we never see Snape teach a Defense Against the Dark Arts class. And that’s criminal, really.

As with film 5, there’s too many choices for a best line. Maggie Smith gets some rare and welcome snark when, after telling Harry he can sign up for Advanced Potions now that Slughorn is teaching it, also says “Potter, take Weasley with you. He looks far too happy over there.” I laughed out loud in the theater when, early in the film, Dumbledore brings Harry to Slughorn’s house and says Harry must be wondering why they’ve come, and Harry responds “Actually, sir, after all these years I just sort of go with it.” But my current favorite is when, in the library, Hermione tells Harry that Romilda Vane has a crush on him. Harry stares at Romilda across the desks and Hermione snaps her fingers in front of him: “Hey! She's only interested in you because she thinks you're the Chosen One.” Harry: “But I am the Chosen One.” And Hermione promptly smacks him on the head with a newspaper.

There are of course a few other things I would’ve liked more of. Neville and Luna, after getting more attention in film 5, are mostly ignored here. The scene at the Burrow with Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, Lupin and Tonks was good, but left me wanting more from the Order as well. Other things felt just about right: Bellatrix shows up just often enough to be a threat without detracting from the main story, and the opening scene with her, Snape, and Cissy Malfoy is compact and well done. There was just enough Quidditch to have Ron’s needed moments of glory in tryouts and a match; the game itself, after Voldemort’s return, really belongs only in the kids’ movies. I could go on for a long time about how much I like that Voldemort never appears in the present in book or film 6, just in the past, and how the potentiality of the past is scary enough in its own right. This of course would get me into my pet theory of how the Potter books work, mirroring each other, with books 2 and 6 paired for many reasons. I won’t go there; you can find a little more of it in my original review of film 6 earlier on the blog.

I will say, however, that Michael Gambon has to work just as hard as the young actors in this film, carrying much of the exposition and narrative urgency of the movie. He does a great job, primarily because he and the filmmaker’s clearly see Dumbledore as having gone through a bit of evolving on his own. He’s more frank, less obscure in his replies to Harry and how he shares his thoughts. He’s more human than ever before, as we see his burned hand, distended and warped. He makes decisions not having a good sense of their outcomes, and sometimes he makes bad ones. He repeatedly emphasizes that he’s expendable, tending to shock whoever he’s speaking with. Lastly of course, he’s mortal, and dies at Snape’s hands. It’s one of the best changes from the book to the film, in my opinion, that instead of petrifying Harry so he can’t interfere, he asks for Harry’s word that he won’t, and Harry keeps it, though afterwards Harry is devastated by doing so. In this way Harry earns the mission to go find the rest of the horcruxes, setting up the main storyline to book and film 7. He earns the quest too by his reaction to Dumbledore’s death; in stark contrast to Cedric’s, Harry is still caught up in overpowering emotion, but here is silent, tender, putting a hand on Dumbledore’s beard, then chest. Rather than fighting off those who would comfort him, he puts his head on Ginny’s shoulder as he cries. Grief for a friend and father figure is a deep sadness, but Harry chooses to bear it rather than let it sweep him away. In the last scene of the movie, as he tells Ron and Hermione of his plans, he reiterates that he’s going to do it alone, but their wish to share his struggles and sorrows make them choose to go with him, altogether fitting as the themes from film 5 are solidified here in film 6, between those who choose to isolate themselves and those who choose to rely on friendship.

7a. the Deathly Hallows part 1, November 2010. Dumbledore gone, and no one left in charge of the Order. Hogwarts unsafe for Harry, even if he wanted to return. A new Minister of Magic opens the film with a brave speech about defending liberty and the ministry remaining strong in these dark times; his words are immediately undercut by the Dursleys, sensing so much danger they abandon Privet Drive and Harry, and Hermione forced to keep her parents safe by wiping herself completely from their lives and memories. This is how the final chapter of our story opens. At the time of its release, many critics only talked about how most of the movie is a set-up for the second film, but didn't go deeper and explore how fundamentally different this film is from every other that came before it. Yates and Kloves alter their directing and writing styles, partly because, yes, this is half of a 5-hour movie, but also because a large part of the underlying power of the story here is the displacement of Harry & his friends out of the magical and into the real world. There was debate over the appropriateness of the Millennium Bridge attack near the start of film 6, but in retrospect it was the teaser, analogous to Rowling starting book 6 at 10 Downing Street, of how eventually this war will spill into Muggle society, with Voldemort in control of the wizarding world, leaving Harry to take refuge on uncertain, foreign ground. Nothing illustrates this better than Bill & Fleur’s wedding reception, first with Harry finding out there's apparently quite a lot he doesn't know about Dumbledore, planting seeds of doubt about his mentor, and immediately followed by the message from Shacklebolt that "the Ministry has fallen." Suddenly the Death-eaters attack the reception. In the chaos, Lupin shoves Harry towards Ron & Hermione and screams for them to go, and Hermione apparates them into the middle of the theater district in London, neon and asphalt everywhere. The crane shot capturing where they are and the swarm of crowds around them is a huge jolt from the humble wedding reception at the Burrow, and from here on the trio is unceremoniously on their own.

Time, for them, stops; Hermione is sad to not be able to celebrate Harry’s birthday, and she and Harry don’t realize it’s Christmas Eve until they hear the church service in Godric’s Hollow. Later in the Forest of Dean, Hermione says the place is just as she remembers it as a child, and half-wishes they could remain there, growing old but never changing, like the forest. Only Ron’s radio connects them to the outside world: a poor, static-filled connection which never tells them much of anything except the lists of newly disappeared or dead wizards killed by the Death-eaters. In the book, frankly, this was a plodding section, not badly written, but just making the same point over and over of how alone the three (and then the two) are. But the filmmaking here marks a tonal shift from what we've seen before: the shots and scenes stretch out; as film 6’s camera work relies on the motif of height and falling, the camera here underscores width, breadth. There are long establishing shots and wide tracking everywhere in this film, especially as Harry and his friends are in the wilderness. Plus, the creation of the short dancing scene between Harry and Hermione is brilliant, adds a depth to their characters and the story, and shows a new way of making Rowling's point she hadn't thought of. On a second viewing, it's my favorite part of the movie.

But if I linger overmuch there, it’s because it makes the danger in the other sections more real for me. The “action” sequences of the film (the escape from Privet Drive to the Burrow, the attack at the diner, infiltrating the Ministry to steal back the locket horcrux, Nagini’s attack at Godric’s Hollow, and the escape from Malfoy Manor) are rather evenly spaced and make the overall slower pacing work, especially with the brief shock scenes of the attacks at the wedding and the Lovegoods’ home, which the trio flee from quickly. It is also crucial – and Rowling has just as much to do with this as the filmmakers – that the latter four sequences all involve Harry and his friends interacting with their enemies only, barring the appearance of the others in the Malfoy dungeon, who (so far) can’t help, and the surprise appearance of Dobby, who does indeed save their lives, but is killed by Bellatrix. It’s as if the Order itself has disappeared and is ineffective: unlike the book, the filmmakers excise the “Potterwatch” resistance radio broadcasts, and after the wedding reception none of the Order is seen again for the rest of the movie.

Though we hear via the radio that Snape has been named Headmaster of Hogwarts and Harry sees him on the Marauder’s Map, his only scene is at the beginning, coming to a meeting at Malfoy Manor and watching coldly as Voldemort kills a fellow Hogwarts teacher. (The visual touch of his Death-eater smoke trail being black at the core and giving off wisps of white smoke at the edges is an ingenious cinematic device.) The additional brief character development we see of the Malfoys is likewise well done, though not for the squeamish: Lucius has broken down mentally and has become a drunk; Draco is even more cowardly (the desperation on Tom Felton’s face as Harry takes away his wand is quite telling); and Bellatrix has become even more deranged and sadistic, sitting on top of Hermione and carving “Mudblood” into her arm, in a truly scary, disgusting quasi-rape. I’ve not happened to read of any reviewer commenting on this scene for what it is actually is, or noting that after, in the remaining few minutes of the film, Hermione just clings to Ron and cries. There's one moment when she brings Dobby’s body to Harry at the grave he’s dug, but then she goes back to Ron and curls up next to him.

It goes almost without saying that Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson have become adept, subtle young actors, turning in performances miles better from even films 4 and 5 when they had started maturing their skills. They shine throughout the movie, especially when they’re playing scenes just themselves together, or riffing off one another in the very few lighter moments. The body language in their performances, as much as the writing, make it very easy to buy that Harry’s and Ron’s relationships with Hermione are completely different from each other, which makes Ron’s refusing Voldemort's temptation and destroying the locket horcrux all the more satisfying. Satisfying also are the inner workings of the Ministry of Magic; it’s evident that the filmmakers loved Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Michael Radford’s film of Orwell’s 1984, borrowing heavily from both to show the dark bureaucracy the Ministry has become under Voldemort’s control. Whoever the three actors are who played our trio under Polyjuice Potion do quite well, awkward in their bodies yet still displaying little gestures and tics common to Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

Coming to the end of all these recaps I’m realizing that what I gravitate towards most in the Harry Potter movies is a highly structured stylization. Having read the books first and enjoyed them all (apart from book 5), the need for highly developed characters isn’t crucial for me, though I certainly appreciate it where I find it, and films 6 and 7a get high marks because of it. The “magic” element isn’t as much of a draw either, and although I’d love an invisibility cloak or the Marauder’s Map or the chance to take a Potions class, that the films show all these things doesn’t specifically endear the films to me. The effects throughout the series are, with few and minor exceptions, excellently done. Maybe it’s because Rowling herself structures her stories so intricately, I like to see an equally intricate care taken with the cinematic style of the movies. The Columbus films don’t offer much here because they tell far more than they show, which is the same problem, in my opinion, with film 4. Film 5 improves on the book dramatically, but its pacing is off and there’s a fair amount of structure, but it just swirls around its one theme, sometimes well and sometimes rather listlessly. Film 3 is by far the most completely stylized, and some would say overstylized, but because it’s a style I’ve loved long before the Potter films came along, I just enjoy it. Film 6 is far more subtle, but once you see the stylization you realize it’s everywhere and as I said earlier, I really like the structure having almost equal weight given to the horcrux and romance storylines. And film 7a we’ll have to call incomplete for the moment, because obviously I haven’t seen 7b yet, though I will at some point and write a review here when I can. But so far, I’d call 7a on its own at least as good as film 6, through structured and stylized in an almost opposite way to that film. I’d imagine after directing two and writing five of these, Yates and Kloves respectively found that radical a change refreshing. That they maintained a continuity of character and tone, albeit an ever-darkening tone, between these changes is an achievement. As the slower pacing of 7a involved a little over 60% of the original book, I’m expecting the same pacing to continue in 7b with the remaining 40%, and I’m looking forward to that.

Oh, and the best line for 7a? There’s a handful (literally, only a handful) of funny moments, most of them visual, not dialogue-driven, but admittedly there was an unexpected one I had to smile at. I almost can’t believe I’m giving Dobby props for anything, but after loosening the chandelier in Malfoy Manor so that it almost crushes Bellatrix, she snaps “You stupid elf! You could have killed me!” It’s both the actual words Dobby responds with, and the indignant tone in which he says them: “Dobby never meant to kill! Dobby only meant to maim, or seriously injure!”

Recap Reviews: Harry Potter 1-4

2011-07-20T23:24:00.006-04:00

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been preparing for the release of “HP7b,” as I like to call it, by rewatching, usually in bits and pieces while eating or when I have fifteen or twenty minutes free, the first seven films. An early thought to re-read books 6 and 7 (I couldn’t bear to have to re-read book 5) went by the wayside quickly; I don’t have that kind of time this summer. But before now I haven’t watched any of the films more than once, apart from numbers 3 and 6, which are my favorites. So I thought a brief recap of my thoughts on rewatching them might not go amiss before seeing the last film and writing a review of it.

1. the Sorcerer’s Stone, November 2001. I remember being impressed, at the time, that they’d gotten much of Rowling’s wizarding world right, but now that feels overshadowed by how clunky the story is. Chris Columbus’ direction is quite scattered; here he’s making a kids’ adventure movie, here it’s an English boarding-school film, there it’s an excuse to show cool special effects or the weird but lavish costume and set design. Richard Harris as Dumbledore was a good choice for the early films; sadly, he passed away after the second, and we’ll never see him portray a much more, well, active Dumbledore, but I daresay he would’ve done well. I think somewhere in a recent interview with Rupert Grint (Ron) I remember him saying something like for the first couple films he just said his lines and there wasn’t much more to it than that. It’s true – the three kids are uniformly promising actors, but just too young to really carry their characters all that effectively. Maybe that’s why Columbus had to shift tone so often.

The writing is mostly all right, but nothing special. In hindsight, there’s a little too much at the start with the Dursleys, a lot too much with setting up and wandering around Hogwarts. In fact, both of Columbus’s movies give Hogwarts, just the place itself apart from anything in the plots, too much screen time: lingering shots and wide-angles that are rather bland. Later directors capture the “old pile” much better and more efficiently. Alan Rickman was less solid as Snape than I remembered; Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid was more. Best scenes: Hagrid and Harry in Diagon Alley is some of the more natural exposition/character development in the movie. The troll in the bathroom. The Quidditch scenes are also decent, or at least better than I remembered. The final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort/Quirrell is actually quite good, if a little light on logic. Best line: Dumbledore, before the assembled student body: “Also, our caretaker, Mr. Filch, has asked me to remind you that the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a most painful death.”

2. the Chamber of Secrets, November 2002. A year can make a definite difference. The main thing that’s better about Chamber of Secrets is that most everyone (director, writer, cast, crew) have done this once already, and the new additions (such as Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, and Mark Williams as Aurthur Weasley) fit seamlessly into the cast. Then, of course, there’s Dobby, who’s entirely annoying. Rowling’s fitting of the house-elves into the world she’s created makes a degree of sense, but only a degree. Dobby is sadly crucial to the stories, but thankfully the filmmakers have uniformly lessened (e.g. Kreacher) or removed (most of book/film 5) any other subplots involving them. We see the Slytherin common room for the first time, which is nicely understated with cold, smooth stone furnishings which are reprised in more fantastical ways in the Chamber of Secrets itself. Steve Kloves is more confident in his adaptation and the writing contains some real dialogue instead of throwaway jokes or bursts of exposition like most of the first movie. Once again the Quidditch scenes, now with Draco as the Slytherin seeker, hold up better than I remembered. In fact, the dynamic between Draco and Harry is nicely developed, much better than in the previous film, and their dueling scene is well shot and acted.

There’s still a goodly number of clumsy moments and scenes: Harry being discovered at scenes of the various petrifications (once seemingly by half the school, who all just happened to be wandering through that hall at that moment); most of the scenes with Moaning Mrytle; the Dark Forest and Aragog, which is entirely exposition, Ron being scared, and the stupid flying car; and come to think of it, most every scene concerning the stupid flying car. At the same time, Columbus seems to be allowing his cast and editors a little more latitude for whimsy, as can be seen in the brief but charming scene with Miriam Margoyles as Madame Pomfrey and her baby mandrakes, and in establishing the quirky charm and total disarray of The Burrow (the Weasleys’ home), something later directors were no doubt very thankful to have already sketched out for them. In the later films, most all of the scenes at The Burrow (apart from when the Death-eaters destroy it in film 6) owe quite a lot to Columbus’ setup here. Best scene: by far, the final confrontation in the Chamber between Harry – and Fawkes – with the basilisk and Tom Riddle. The thought, time and energy put into the scene, which goes for 13 minutes, shows in the direction, writing, editing, acting, and effects. In hindsight, it’s in many ways the first mature scene of the series, and a very satisfactory ending to this movie, notwithstanding the obligatory (though well done) explaining-it-all scene with Dumbledore following. Best line: Hagrid, after Ron has been brought to him coughing up slugs from a spell gone wrong: “This calls for specialist equipment.” He hands Ron a gigantic wooden bucket. “Nothing t’ do but wait ‘til it stops, I'm afraid. Better out than in.”

3. the Prisoner of Azkaban, June 2004. There’s really two reasons why this may well be my favorite film of them all. First, there’s little about it which doesn’t work as a movie, from pacing to acting, costumes and sets to writing. Second, Alfonso Cuaron decided to ground the look and feel of everything about it in the Expressionist style of filmmaking, which was the vogue of Germany during the Weimar Republic, that brief moment from 1919-1932, in between the World Wars and before fascism and Hitler came to power. It’s a masterful, brilliant stylistic decision, just right for not only the world of Harry Potter in general, but for this story in particular with its werewolf and an escaped murderer and the terrifying Dementors. The hallmarks are unmistakable: everything angular, stretching of sets taller than wide (and so a fear of falling), pinhole fades and reveals to start and end scenes, “harsh” sound effects with “hollow” reverb not only of noises but also of voices, dreamy atmospheres of smoke and color washes, a prevalence of night scenes and bad weather and motifs involving darkness, repetition in storytelling often with unreliable narrators, doppelgängers, fate as inevitable over choice, and themes of the macabre and unnatural, isolation and danger and madness. Hey, if your country had just lost World War I and your depressed, demoralized citizenry had been levied with unreasonable reparations and the guilt of a lost generation, you’d arrive at this kind of art too.

The actors who project a darker tone do best here: Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, and Alan Rickman own this movie. Emma Thompson, as bumbling psychic Sybil Trelawney, is a master of flicking the switch between comic relief and creepy. The “sunnier” actors (Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltrane, and Julie Walters as Molly Weasley) get little screen time: a judicious if slightly unfair choice. Due to Richard Harris’s death, Michael Gambon was brought in as Dumbledore, though truthfully he has very little to do in this movie other than a few scattered lines and a short speech as he commissions Harry & Hermione to use the Time Turner. Gambon’s Dumbledore is more authoritative, more obviously alert and spry than Harris’s, which does seem slightly out of place, especially in film 4, but will serve him better in films 5 and 6. (Realistically, in 2003-05 when films 3 and 4 were filmed and released, Rowling published book 5 and wrote and published book 6, so Steve Kloves and Michael Gambon were aware of what kind of portrayal was going to be needed.) The child actors have also grown in their trade, and Emma Watson especially gives a nuanced performance.

Mind you, it’s not perfect. It irks me that the authors of the Marauder’s Map are never revealed. The scene in Hogsmeade with Harry listening in on McGonagall and Cornelius Fudge’s conversation feels like it exists solely for plot (and to give Maggie Smith some lines). The closing shot, of Harry flying, is kind of dumb. But these are small quibbles. As to best scenes, there’s more of them than not. Harry searching for Peter Pettigrew and being found with the Marauder’s Map by Snape. Hermione punching Malfoy. Lupin introducing the Boggart. The confrontation in the Shrieking Shack, and how the seven actors involved handle the largely expository scene with raw emotion. Marking the seasons by the Whomping Willow. In the whole first section, the film alternating between comic and threatening notes: through the Dursleys, Night Bus, Leaky Cauldron, Hogwarts Express, and the usual half-welcome, half-warning speech by Dumbledore. The writing and directing is tight and sharp. And like movie 2, the closing sequence is well earned, though here the closing sequence is really the entire last act, as the trio discover all the plot’s secrets, and then Harry & Hermione re-enact the same journey, shadowing themselves and trying to correct what went wrong the first time. Best line: Ron in Divination class, about Harry’s tea leaves: “Well, Harry's got a sort of wonky cross... that's trials and suffering. And, uh, that there could be the sun, and that's happiness, so... you're gonna suffer... but you're gonna be happy about it.”

4. the Goblet of Fire, November 2005. Ah yes, the Bad Hair Movie. Both Harry and Ron’s greasy, fluttery hairdos make an unfortunate sight; Hermione’s smoothed crown with tangled locks looks almost like Hagrid when he combs his hair, minus the beard of course. Still, one has to credit Mike Newell and Steve Kloves with some good decisions, as this is the first novel which needed major trimming to fit into a movie. On the plus side, Dobby is completely gone, and though this may not meet with universal acclaim, I was happy to see Quidditch basically vanish as well. The World Cup is needed to set up various plot points and characters, but the match itself isn’t necessary. By and large there’s a decent economy of scale at work throughout the movie, with minor but necessary scenes treated quickly but well, such as Snape’s accusing Harry of stealing from his storeroom or the Weasley twins attempting to cheat the Goblet of Fire. Main character development is well done, helped by the fact that now all three child actors are quite good at their roles: Harry & Ron’s falling out, and Ron & Hermione’s sulky, snippy not-lovers’ quarrels over having dates for the Yule Ball catch the right note of the stupid teenage emotional rollercoaster. Even a few of the secondary characters get some nice shading, Neville’s surprising enjoyment of dancing and his helping out Harry with the second task, for example. Still, other old friends like Malfoy and Snape, and the new additions of Cedric Diggory and Cho Chang, suffer from not enough screen time, and there’s sadly only one and a half scenes with Rita Skeeter, Miranda Richardson wickedly stealing both of them. Best line: Malfoy, about to curse Harry while Harry’s back is turned, gets turned into a ferret by an angry Alistair Moody, who proceeds to toss the ferret repeatedly in the air with his wand. McGonagall (running up): “Professor Moody, what are you doing?!” Moody: “Teaching.” However, Dumbledore is a bit strange, or rather, Michael Gambon’s portrayal is. He’s so much angrier than I remember him being from the book, frustrated and peevish. It’s not until his final scene in Harry’s dorm that he feels like the Dumbledore I think of. Gambon does just fine, for me, in the other films, but here he seems off-kilter.

Full disclosure: book 4 was my favorite of the series, so I tend to cast a slightly more negative eye on the movie than perhaps I should. In the movie, once the Tri-Wizard Tournament begins, it’s practically the entire rest of the picture apart from the Yule Ball. In the book, there’s so much more going on in between each task of the tournament. There’s still some good stuff: best scenes include Harry & Moaning Myrtle in the tub, Harry’s contest with the dragon, the gruff cruelty of Moody’s lesson on the Unforgivable Curses, and Moody’s own unmasking at the end, the sinister truth dawning upon Harry slowly and to full effect. However, like movie 2, the final confrontation is really the crucial thing: Voldemort returning to life, a truly evil being released upon the world, taunting and torturing Harry and salivating as he moves in for the kill. Harry has two shining moments, both brilliantly captured by Daniel Radcliffe: the choice to emerge from hiding and face Voldemort on his own terms, and the return to Hogwarts with the Tri-Wizard Cup and Cedric’s body. The scene is, even on repeated viewings, quite moving. Harry and Cedric appear, Harry clutching the cup and Cedric’s arm, and the crowd goes wild, cheering as the band strikes up. Harry is dazed, and slowly those close to him realize something is very, very wrong. The celebration is thrown into confusion and fear by tragedy. Cedric’s body cold and stiff, Harry shaking and crying and trying to throw himself protectively around it. Dumbledore and Snape moving in instinctively to shield Harry; Harry wildly chokes out that Voldemort has returned and killed Cedric; Cedric’s father and Mr. Weasley pushing their way forward and falling into grief. Harry’s world, and the tone of the film series, are cast into shadow and changed.

Top 10 Albums of 2011, First Half

2011-06-30T23:03:00.000-04:00

Every Christmastime, a group of my college friends who either live in Massachusetts or are usually visiting family there for the holiday, get together for an evening of sushi and conversation; for most of us, it's the only time during the year we see each other. And this past Christmas, Tin Man and I were talking about how it's hard to keep up with bands we like, much less going through back catalogs of those bands who've been recording for a long time, because there's been so much new music we've been getting exposed to and enjoying. And while that's not a bad thing, I always have this edge of concern when I look back over past top 10 album lists and see so many recently released albums. I just don't want to turn into one of those people who thinks all "current" music is great and whatever came before is crap. I see it as something prevalent among students at Bluebell, and wonder if it's age-related - certainly some of the songs I discovered in college remain among my most cherished - or whether it's a general human temptation, the cult of the new, that old Progressivist strain, so much a part of the American psyche through the centuries. Yet here I am again, and can only write what I know, and for the first half of 2011, three of the five albums have all been released in the last six months.

Once again Grooveshark isn't playing nice with me, so there's no playlist at the end. I'll substitute lists of recommended tracks and let you explore iTunes, YouTube, or other avenues of online listening.

artist - album - year of release

5 - Spiro - Lightbox - 2009. During the 12 days between Christmas and Epiphany (you know, like the song with a forest of pear trees), Peter Gabriel's Real World Records label had a special sale where each day there was a deep discount on one album, with two of Peter's own albums bookending the promotion. Spiro's Lightbox was one of the albums I picked up, intrigued by the idea of a strings-only instrumentals-only band based in Bristol, England and influenced by classical and Celtic music. The four members of the group play violin, viola, mandolin, accordion, acoustic guitar, and cello; their music is exacting, cinematic, and produced close to the vest, steering a middle road between slick and folksy. For as much as I expected a sameness to the sound of the tracks, I was pleasantly surprised to find many different vibes and atmospheres developed, and some quirky moments that became more enjoyable the more I lived with the album (which, in my experience, tends to be true more often of classical music than other genres). So the fusion felt both organic and successful, and while I can't say I'll likely have this album in my car or on repeat in my apartment, there's a time and place for all things, and in a particular mood, this album is just right. Recommended tracks: A Small Light in the Far West, The White Hart, I Fear You as I Fear Ghosts, Wolves.

4 - Abigail Washburn - City of Refuge - 2011. While not quite as well known as her husband, Bela Fleck, Abigail Washburn, with her primary instrument of clawhammer banjo, is steadily building a following of fans who appreciate her eccentric and often clever style of music which draws equally on Western folk & Celtic traditions and Eastern composition approaches, mostly from China. This means her albums have a wide swing of the pendulum, City of Refuge being no exception, as the Appalachian folk of "Divine Bell" moves to the almost-pop of "Chains" and the social justice storytelling of "Corner Girl" and "Dreams of Nectar" contrast with the madrigal-inspired love lyrics of "Ballad of Treason." There's "Bring Me My Queen," a gorgeous and academic meditation on feminism, and "Last Train," about the longing to simply run away and leave all your cares behind. Diversity of thought and diversity of execution are pretty much the watchwords for this album, and some of it works coherently, but some of it doesn't. She played a show at Bluebell last December, and watching her live was the impetus for picking up the album when it was released a month later. All in all, the first half of the record is stronger, especially musically, while the latter half drags in more than one place. I often find myself listening to the first 2/3rds of the record and then jumping back to the beginning. However, the title track itself is one of the best-written, almost-perfectly performed songs I've heard in years. That one song on its own earned the album a place in this list, and everything else is just icing. Recommended tracks: City of Refuge, Bring Me My Queen, Chains, Burn Thru.

3 - Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues - 2011. Described to me initially as "six guys with beards from Seattle" Fleet Foxes' second album was very much an impulse buy, having heard only a few snippets from the first couple of tracks. Let's be clear about something from the start: most all their music is a rehash of other bands. The Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel are everywhere; likewise CSNY and America have a heavy influence. There's a little bit of Jim Croce, a smidge of Nick Drake, and a healthy dollop of British folk-rock/early prog bands like Pentangle and Renaissance. The interesting thing about Fleet Foxes is how they put all these influences together, making a collage of sound that's something more than pastiche and yet not quite homage. In other words, their music is largely but not entirely the sum of its parts, and it's that ineffable something which makes them interesting beyond a few cursory listens. The album has been intricately crafted, several songs making reference to others and the final track nodding to almost every other. Largely about the feeling of being lost in the world, some tracks address this theme squarely (the title track, "Montezuma," "Someone You'd Admire," "Lorelai") and others more indirectly, with perhaps the most accessible of these being "Battery Kinzie" which includes lyrics like "I came to your window, threw a stone and waited/At the door a stranger stood; the stranger's voice said nothing good/I turned to walk the frozen ground alone/all the way home." I haven't run into anything else in our day and age which is so close to early Paul Simon and yet can stand on its own.

Not every song is a home run; the few that hang their hat on lead singer Robin Pecknold's voice for grounding, rather than the music, tend to falter. Only once does the album descend into cliche, but the song in question, "Blue Spotted Tail," is almost unlistenable. At the same time, once in a while their ambitions show through, and often it's quite good: on the longest track, "The Shrine/An Argument," musical tension flip-flops in stark and satisfying ways within a proggy pastoral vibe before levelling to the musical equivalent of sunshine over the ocean, only to dissolve into a chaos of muted brass notes at the end. It's by far the most fascinating track on the record. Overall, the freshness of the band and album stems from the fact that the musicians and songwriters they fashion themselves after are, with perhaps the exceptions of CSNY and Nick Drake, very much out of vogue in today's music scene. (Everyone pays lip service to The Beach Boys, of course, but no one seems to actually listen to them much.) That Fleet Foxes can shamelessly borrow from all these disparate acts and then meld them into something more is an admirable feat. It's just once in a while on the record, things are a little too baldly stated: the opening line of "Bedouin Dress" is "If to borrow is to take and not return, then I have borrowed all my lonesome life." Just a little more creativity wouldn't go amiss. Recommended tracks: Montezuma, Sim Sala Bim, Helplessness Blues, The Shrine/An Argument, Grown Ocean.

2 - Pink Martini - Hang On Little Tomato - 2004. In February I was asked to bartend a mocktails party for the undergrad social house here at Bluebell that I'm the faculty/staff advisor for. And so I asked my colleague and friend Frosty for good cocktail party music, emphasis on "good." This is the album he gave me, which became an all-around win because it's so good, it's playable anywhere. I mentioned in the above review of Spiro's Lightbox that it satisfies a certain mood. Well, Pink Martini has been able to fit into almost any mood I've been in, winter, spring, or summer. A "little orchestra," Pink Martini has featured a mostly-stable roster of a dozen musicians trained in both classical and modern music, presided over by founder and pianist Thomas M. Lauderdale. However, my favorite definition of the group is by Lauderdale himself, who is quoted as saying Pink Martini is "music of the world without being world music. If the United Nations had a house band in 1962, hopefully Pink Martini would be that band." This album, the group's second of five to date, has 14 tracks, half of them sung in another language, from French to Italian, Japanese to Croatian. Some are covers; many are originals written by members of the group. The production is tight and glossy; if you think of a 1960s performance style recorded with 21st-Century equipment and production values, you'll have a good sense of the overall sound.

Along with the varied languages, the genres vary from lounge-act to singer-songwriter, or a film score to something just shy of a night at the opera. Singing duties are given to numerous individuals, with the range of a sultry female alto performance in "Lilly" to warbling baritones in "Kikuchiyo to Mohshimasu." A breezy, music-hall solo in "The Gardens of Sampson & Beasley" precedes a low, ruminating vocal filled with unrequited longing in "Veronique." The album earns the number 2 spot from me for two reasons. First, it plays constantly with tone, range, atmosphere, and execution, and everything is spot on. It's rare that I've heard an album so professionally done and yet so emotionally warm. Second, the songs have that rare quality of transporting a listener to another place and time, and letting him or her wander there for a while. This is expansive music, not narrow and not demanding of strict attention at all times. As someone who tends to like music you have to think about, this attitude is a welcome change from that, and the band does a great job of encouraging listeners to slip away on their gentle melodies and comfortable rhythms. It's a cocktail using top shelf spirits, and mixed well. Recommended tracks: The Gardens of Sampson & Beasley, Veronique, Dansez-Vous, U Plavu Zoru, Una Notte a Napoli.

1 - Alison Krauss & Union Station - Paper Airplane - 2011. Though in the last handful of years Alison Krauss has released a best-of collection and the phenomenal Raising Sand album with Robert Plant and T-Bone Burnett, it's been seven years since the last proper AKUS album. But their unique brand of bluegrass hasn't aged a day. 2004's Lonely Runs Both Ways, made relatively quickly after the amazing success of the group's live album in 2002, had a rushed feeling to it, as well as a bit of everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. While not a bad album, it felt bloated, especially since half a dozen of the tracks were obvious b-side candidates tossed in to ride the wave of the group's success. The stronger songs were sometimes drowned out. Musically leaner, and lyrically perhaps even lonelier, Paper Airplane is a stunning achievement which bridges the band's usual haunts of bluegrass, newgrass, folk, country, and pop in a natural, almost off-hand way. Three standout tracks propelled it into the number 1 spot for this half of the year. The opener and title track, penned by one of the group's standard go-to songwriters, Robert Lee Castleman, is a true songwriter's song, delicate and powerful at the same time, filled with quiet longing and honest, heartbreaking reality. It's a showcase for Krauss' voice, and she displays a sage knowledge of when to have restraint and also when to aim for the rooftops.

The album closer, a cover of Jackson Browne's "My Opening Farewell" is perhaps one of the most balanced songs between Krauss' voice and the band's music, both spiraling together like steel cords, resulting in a weighty interpretation at once poignant and joyful. If the relationship spoken of in "Paper Airplane" is fragile, the relationship here is affectionate. Though both relationships are ending and both passions are going, the range between the emotions involved is varied, and real, and performed very, very well. In between these songs (in fact, smack in the middle of the album) is the third outstanding track, a cover of Richard Thompson's "Dimming of the Day." Now, this song in particular, about the stark need of one person for another, has been significant to me for over a decade now, my first exposure to it being John Sayles' 1999 film Limbo, a movie still intensely important to me in several ways. The AKUS version is simply the best I've ever heard. It takes me outside of time for a few brief moments. And that's really all I can say about it.

A strength of the band has always been its shared vocal duties; when Dan Tyminski is singing, Krauss is almost always playing violin, adding another texture to the music. Tyminski's distinctive voice has, if possible, gotten even better over the past half-decade. The three tracks he sings on ("Dust Bowl Children," "On the Outside Looking In," and "Bill and Bonita Butler"), rollicking tunes all, suit his talents well and help broaden the band's palette; Krauss' voice is beautiful but has no grit, which is just fine with me, but it's nice to have some vocals the metal gutters can shiver to, not just the glass windowpanes. Various songwriters, all talented, round out the rest of the album, all the songs originals save the two covers already mentioned. Krauss' brother Viktor, another AKUS writing mainstay, adds the catchy "Lie Awake," while Aiofe O'Donovan, the lead voice and sometime writer for Crooked Still (who made an appearance in this past December's top 5 albums) contributes the sad and sprawling "Lay My Burden Down." The ever-sharp Tim O'Brien writes "On the Outside Looking In," and Lori McKenna with two co-writers gives us the anthemic "My Love Follows You Where You Go," one of only two "happy" songs on the record.

I follow a group blog which AKUS member Ron Block (banjo and guitar) is part of, and in talking about the band getting back together to record and then tour for Paper Airplane, he talks frequently of how they're like a family, and how easy it is to come back together as musicians and friends (even though of course there's the usual number of arguments about music which happen). I would imagine that's the only way a band can stay together for just about 25 years. That a 25-year old band can still be making fresh, enjoyable, captivating music together is rare and to be cherished. I'm excited to be seeing AKUS live for the first time at the end of July, and quite pleased to say their new record is #1 for me this time around. Recommended tracks: Paper Airplane, My Love Follows You Where You Go, Dimming of the Day, Bill and Bonita Butler, My Opening Farewell.

Union, Reunion

2011-06-22T22:22:00.019-04:00

Wabbit season! Duck season! Nope: mawwiage season!

Summer is of course the time most couples tend to get married, and I've just returned from a weekend in Mobile, at the wedding of two dear alum friends from Bluebell, classes of 2006 and 2009. It's also the only time in my life so far, and perhaps to come, when I have any reason to go to Alabama. I learned several things while there. For example, they really do have license plates which say "Sweet Home" across the top with "Alabama" along the bottom. Mobile is far more green and wooded and much less swampy than I had expected, though another of the guests remarked that, being on the bay and opening out to the Gulf, most any green thing grows and grows tall with that kind of humidity. And what humidity! The consistency of the air was more swampy than the ground. And of course there's air conditioning in every building imaginable, but that made me also realize: I wouldn't be able to live long in a place where you can't open your windows in homes, cars, offices and breathe in deep. Thankful as I was for the a/c, there's something soulless about living in nothing but mechanically moderated environments. I'm sure winter is better for breathing the air in Mobile - and certainly, we in New England don't tend to open our windows in the extreme cold... though, honestly, I do, and many others I know do as well. Not all the time in December-March, but every so often, just to bring in fresh air, and because the cold is bracing, gets the blood flowing. Ah well, different places feel right to different people. I was chatting with one of the bridesmaids, who grew up in Mobile, had gone to the Carolinas for school, and had now moved back to Mobile because she loved the heat and it was part of "home" for her.

Of course, as much as one attends any wedding for the bride and groom, it's also to see the other guests, with whom you spend most of your time anyways. A fair few Bluebell alums made the trip, and it was great to see them and hang around and talk, however briefly, between flying in on Friday and out on Sunday. We remarked how it seems after college, especially when people came to that college from all over the country and globe, how far flung we become once again after graduating. More than once it was said that now we'll see each other at weddings and funerals, hopefully more of the former. This is adulthood, it seems: unless we only make friends in our hometown, and stay there, and they do too, we are by default living far away from those closest to us. Someone I once dated said that those she held dearest were usually the friends she hadn't seen for the longest time, because distance smoothed out rough edges and it was easier to remember the good times, the good things in their personalities and characteristics. But that seems to me, while holding a grain of truth, an unecessarily cynical view. Surely we all have those moments, where we meet again with old friends and have nothing to say anymore, but I've found those moments to be rare. It seems to me that those who've shared a depth of friendship can access it across a span of years, geography, and most of life's experiences, assuming of course they're interested in "picking up where we left off," which is a personal choice one can do nothing but respect when the other person isn't interested.

The wedding wasn't the only event this month that gave me pause to think about the nature of friendship generally and my own friendships in particular: each June has Bluebell's Reunion Weekend, something most colleges have soon after the school year ends. I spent the entire Saturday of that weekend bouncing back and forth between friends in the classes of 2001 (juniors my senior year of college) and 2006 (sophomores the year I returned to Bluebell after grad school). Two were houseguests and dear friends from my World of Warcraft guild, another couple one of my closest friends in college and her husband, with the exciting news that they're pregnant with their first child. And more friends, from both classes, I hadn't kept in touch with but it was easy to see and talk with again, and catch up on our lives.

As usual during Reunion, there was both attendance at some of the college-sponsored events, and some ditching of them to spend time in local restaurants, a nearby lake, and just sitting and talking in dorms or out on the grass. At one point mid-afternoon when I was with the 2001s, there were eight of us crammed into a freshman dorm room - the alums 10 years out get the smallest of the 3 freshman dorms - and we couldn't stop laughing about how, once upon a time, we thought this was amazing housing for two people, in those wide-eyed first months of college. Much later that night, in a different dorm room (only slightly larger) with ten of the '06 crowd, we scooched up beside each other to fit in, on the bed and chairs and floor, and passed around some Jameson's and chocolate-covered almonds. Hey, it was what we had at the time. It was amusing to note how some of the conversations were similar between the two groups and some were different. All Bluebell kids, the groups just shy of having the opportunity to know each other, and arguably on the cusp of opposite sides of the Generation X/Millennials divide. It was satisfying to me to be sitting there, comfortable in both groups, and to reflect on that.

We all have things we take pride in, and sometimes too much, but what we esteem about ourselves says things, for good and for ill. I don't know that I could have owned this a few years ago, but looking over the past month I find it's true: I take pride in having friendships - some of them deep friendships - with people of widely different ages from myself, and especially from the past 17 years of Bluebell students, from the 1997s who were seniors my freshman year, all the way through this recent year's freshmen, the 2014s. It feels strange to say that, partly because it doesn't feel like I've spent that much of my life associated with Bluebell, though I have. Part of it is also because it feels odd for me, as an introvert, to not only have friends across that wide of a spectrum, but also to have pride in it. But it does mean a lot to me that I continue to develop friendships with people of different generations, different dispositions, with different interests and passions as the years pass. I know people who can't do this, and others who want to but don't seem to know how. I'm not sure I know how either, other than by having a good sense of who you are personally, and being a good listener to others. And you'd have to be actually interested in other people, which I see less of in the world at large than I would have guessed. Not that I'm interested in most or even many people, but some people are interesting, and worth pursuing.

I've been told that my attitude may change if I get married, and that's fair: it might. When I've been in relationships my interest in outside friendships hasn't overly changed, but there's been a subtle shift away from forming new ones sometimes. And I can see marriage pushing that shift even more, in both emotional and very practical ways. When you have to consider the friendship habits and energy levels of your partner, attentiveness to what you find interesting in other people decreases. And then of course there's the dilemma of finding friends you both like. So I'm willing to give some creedence to the thought that it's partly because I'm unmarried that I tend to just pursue friendships I'm interested in without much hesitation. Still, I can't agree with that being the only, or primary reason. Which brings my thoughts full circle to the wedding in Mobile: two people I knew as my friends separately and then together, the feeling of honor to be asked to celebrate their union with them, and for being able to renew friendships among those they also invited. I wish them the best of this world: health, happiness, a long life together, creativity (pro- or otherwise), and good friends. Friends to share weddings and funerals, those big events of life. And reunions, the times to remember and cherish what came before.

Projects in Ordinary Time

2011-05-23T20:27:00.001-04:00

Commencement was yesterday at Bluebell, and after the official events and running around for friends most of the day, I had a late dinner with Aznable, his girlfriend, parents, and four other alums who had come back for the weekend. Most people were going separate ways afterwards, but I brought one of the alums back to campus, where she was crashing for the night before leaving this morning. As we drove through, many of the buildings dark and shuttered, I realized it was the first time in over three weeks, between the frenzy of last classes, exams, and Senior Week, that Bluebell was actually quiet. The warm night air sailing past the open car windows had no noise of parties, laughter, friendly shouts across the quad, sounds of frisbees and footballs being thrown. I remarked on this to my passenger and we sat silent, listening, as the car continued to wind its way up the main drag. Later, I continued what's now a three-year personal tradition, and went to the library alone, up onto the outer terrace overlooking the main administrative building and original two dorms the College started with. With some amaretto and a celebratory cigar I sat there, thinking about the past year and listening to the muted campus, as it finally released its breath after a very long winter and barely-arrived spring, its faculty and administrators off somewhere and happy for another year's successful end, its students gone for the summer, graduates scattering for ports unknown. I drank to Bluebell, the Class of 2011, and my friends.

My mood from last night has continued into today, largely because of the weather. It's overcast here, and damp but not yet rainy, temperatures in the upper 60s but feeling ten degrees colder because of the breeze, a stiff but fresh air belonging to spring, finally spring, on the downward slope of May. I had a meeting across campus this afternoon, and the place is still quiet, under clouds, less empty than resting. Walking there and back was a calmly satisfying experience, a reminder of the love I have for this school and its people, the ones who have four years here and the ones who have longer.

Part of why I love Bluebell is also part of why I love being Catholic: each has a liturgical year, filled with special celebrations and feasts, times of trial and remembrance, times of joy. And ordinary times, times not particularly noteworthy, when there can be a soft, cloudy spring day, a break in the action, to spend at ease and be grateful for opportunities completed, and begin the delicious process of forming opportunities to come. Though I'm always working on some little project or other during the academic year, it's during the summers that I focus on them, always multiple at a time, spending an afternoon on X and an evening on Y. It's a time of fewer demands from the College and a chance to look more inward, puttering about with things that are only meaningful to me and, therefore, can be explored to whatever extent in whatever way I choose. A day like today, where I codified my summer projects, is a fun day. Though, it's nowhere near summer in anything but the calendar, so maybe it'd be more accurate to call them my projects in ordinary time. And here's what I've got.

1 - I want them off my shelf. A while ago I shared my system, part choice and part chance, to determine books I read. Well, the double-edged sword of working in a library is that I always find more books I want to read. Last fall and winter, I basically let my bookshelves collect dust while I worked on my library books, either reading what I had checked out, or deciding it wasn't crucial enough and returning it to the library. In February I realized I wanted to read down the books on my own shelves, some of them picked up at used bookstores years ago. In the usual system, when one book is read its spot is filled immediately, so in my solution of choice and chance there's always 26 books swirling around. So I picked a new slate of 26, mostly comprised of books which had been on my shelves for years, and as I read them, didn't replace them. Between February and now I've read 10 of the 26, but I'd like to step up the pace and finish the remaining 16 this summer.

2 - "I found out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin, to keep me from flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin. Get comfortable while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters." That's one of my favorite quotes from Portal, a nifty, challenging, hilarious first-person puzzle game released a few years ago which I knew about through friends and finally played last month. You wake up in a lab facility, alone, with a friendly but unseen computer encouraging you through various obstacle course mazes, with a "portal gun" which shoots portals you or other objects can teleport through, into different areas of each maze. Every "floor" in the facility, called the enrichment center, is a puzzle to get to the floor's exit elevator. You have nothing to help you but the gun, an occasional "Companion Cube" which is mute, unlimited time, and the laws of physics. And the computer, which starts out by promising you cake, turns out to be trying to kill you in each puzzle, with the final reward being a pit of fire. Avoiding that, you then have to make your way through the mechanical rooms and other labs of the facility, while the computer continually mocks, insults, pleads with, guilt-trips, and threatens you. When you find it, a piece of itself falls off, and there's a stationary incinerator there, so of course you go destroy the piece, since the computer is trying to destroy you. And then there's the above quote, which gives you five minutes to figure out how to fully defeat the computer before you die of neurotoxin. Highly enjoyable. And all this is to say: the sequel just came out, and I'll be playing that this summer.

3 - The secrets of paganism! Okay, not really. I've posted a few times about World of Warcraft, and my guild is still doing its thing, meeting weekly to run dungeons together. We plan on continuing this summer, but I've decided to work on a side project of my own as well. My very first character in WoW was a druid, a nicely balanced class which, while it couldn't pack the strongest punch in all three roles within a dungeon or raid party (those being the tank, dps, and healer), it could rotate between them as needed and do a decent job in all of them. A tank leads the party, and rushes in front to attack enemies with melee weapons; a dps or caster does spell damage which works by damage per second (hence the acronym) from afar; a healer doesn't attack enemies at all but works at healing the other party members as they get hit. Anyways, my original druid has languished, unplayed, for a few years now, during which WoW has undergone several large changes in how the various classes work. Plus, the most recent expansion pack, Cataclysm, changed the "original" WoW experience of levels 1-60 for all players in huge ways as well (with the total levels now up to 85). So I'd like to relearn how a druid works in the new version of the game, as well as play through a nice chunk of the revised content. I'm going to cash out the gear and money my old druid has, transfer the lump sum to a new druid character, and work at getting her through as much of levels 1-60 as I can during the summer.

4 - Play that funky music, white boy. Growing up in the suburbs of western Massachusetts, there were various genres of music I just wasn't exposed to that much. Over recent years I've tried exploring some of them, and want to make another of those attempts this summer. This March, the Smithsonian Folkways label - and if you ever want to investigate uniquely American music forms and styles, this label is one of your best resources! - put out a 6-CD collection simply called "Jazz." Other than a few random tracks, including the "Maple Leaf Rag," which opens the anthology, I know almost none of the music, and only a scattered handful of the performer names, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis. But even with those, I've never really listened to their work, much less the latter 20th Century interpreters and innovators of their tradition. So this summer I'm going to work through the six discs, seeing what I like and trying to understand it, as much as music can be understood. I'm excited but also nervous - I tend to like form equalling content in music, with my prog-rock and folk leanings, both styles completely different in complexity of music, but both resting on an idea of structure providing direction and resolution to music. We'll see what a more free-form, improvisational and inspirational style will conjure in me.

5 - Back onto the poetry bandwagon. I haven't been writing much lately, and by lately I mean the past year and a half. I think I've put together less than 10 poems in that time, several of them still at the draft stage. So I need a kick in the teeth. And there's nothing like exercise to give you pain. I've put together a large handful of random poems I want to use as exercises for myself, as prompts, to either take line x and use it in a new way, or take theme y and riff off it, etc. What results may well not be suitable for actual poems, but it'll get me writing again, just writing something, and that will be better than where I'm at right now. So that's going to be an ongoing project as well. Maybe a certain number a week; I'm wary of saying something like I have to do one a day, as that's a sure backfire for my personality. We'll see how it shakes out.

6 - More rewatching of more movies. Okay, so never say never, right? After last summer's epic 121-movie rewatching project, I was ready to swear off movies for a few years. But here I am again with another rewatching idea. This one was actually planned for summer 2007 and never happened, then got put on the backburner, but I've become excited about doing it now. I want to rewatch movies which weren't, like last year's project, in my top tier category, but rather movies which just missed that top tier for one reason or another OR I'm just curious to see them again. I went so far in 2007 to put together a list of films for consideration, and without looking at that, I put together a new list now, deciding ahead of time only to take movies which appeared on both lists (unless of course it was a movie I'd first seen after 2007). I impressed myself with how few, of the 1,173 movies I've seen since June 1998, I wanted to watch again, of course after removing the 121 I'd already rewatched last summer. Of the remaining ~1,000 movies, only 97 showed up on both the 2007 and 2011 lists. Now, of course I've seen some of those thousand movies a second time over the years, either with friends or just because I'd wanted to. So those weren't included. Still, just under 10% of the available total is, frankly, a relief!

So what movies are these, you ask, this special 10% of almost-awesome films? Most of them are things I watched in college or grad school, around ten or more years ago - there were fewer and fewer as I got into the recent past. Many of them are classics I just don't remember very well and want to look at again, whereas others have had a small spark somehow which has made me remember them all these years as interesting curios. The list includes things like All the President’s Men; On the Waterfront; The Manchurian Candidate; All About Eve; The Bridge on the River Kwai; Say Anything; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Touch of Evil; Sunset Boulevard; The Long Goodbye; Some Like It Hot; The Lion in Winter; Wonder Boys; Metropolitan; The Last Picture Show; Unbreakable; Klute; The Hustler; Less Than Zero; Badlands; Lost in Translation; Kubrick's version of Lolita. And, of course, Smokey and the Bandit. Yes, there's a large handful of just fun movies there too, hokey and snarky and on no one's "best of" lists, like Timeline and Mallrats and So I Married an Axe Murderer; Shoot 'Em Up and School of Rock and the remake of The Italian Job.

I'll also tell you a little secret: if this movie project needs to get extended into the fall, that's fine too. I should have had this attitude last summer, but didn't, and this time around it's not worth putting that kind of pressure on myself as, after all, no one besides me really cares about any of this. Still, I'm looking forward to it, and plan on diving in with what's left of this evening. Catch you on the flip side!

Life's A Parade

2011-05-20T18:36:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you're playing in the band, sometimes you wave from atop a mechanized float, once in a while it's riding on horseback, and occasionally you're pushing a broom behind the elephants. From my last few posts, it might be inferred I've been camping out with the pachyderms, but in many ways it's been a good semester, one of the better semesters in the last couple years. I thought I'd share a few of the highlights and/or things I've found interesting, in no particular order.

1. Librarian work has been quite satisfying this semester. I've been able to sink my teeth into some hardcore collection development projects, including judgments on a backlog of book titles in my departments our primary book vendor thought we might be interested in. Even better has been getting to weed - that's the library term for combing through books with intent to throw some out - the PRs, which are English Literature primary texts and secondary criticism in the Library of Congress classification scheme. In doing this, I realized from data I gathered that the last time anyone weeded the PRs was 1986, literally 25 years ago. So it was long overdue and I feel confident that I've been able to take books that honestly no one is interested in, or will be, out of our collection. Most satisfying, however, has been a project in collaboration with our Film & Media Department to figure out how to transfer most of our previously "closed-stacks" media, almost entirely DVDs and videocassettes, into open stacks for easier browsing and most importantly, longer check-out periods for students, staff, and faculty. This one is still ongoing, is being coordinated with 5 other staffers, and will take all summer, if not longer. In conjunction we've decided to go through our videocassettes and replace them with DVDs if we can and haven't already, and this will be my largest individual project for the summer. That's over 5500 library records for VHS tapes I'll be looking through in the next three months. It may not sound like fun to you, but I could almost literally break into song and dance over it. And not just because I'll get to order hundreds of DVDs on the College's dime.

2. The '11s at Bluebell are a pretty cool bunch of kids. Not that other classes weren't; far from it. But over the past year and especially this past semester I've met or become friends with, or deepened friendships with, a number of '11s who are impressive, perceptive, and all around fun people. Commencement is this weekend and I will definitely be lifting a glass (or more likely flask) in their honor, wishing them the best as they go into the world, hoping to stay in touch with them through the years ahead.

3. Following the same train of thought, reconnecting with old friends is one of life's greatest joys. The social house on campus I'm staff adviser for had a reunion one weekend this semester, where over a dozen alums came back to catch up, enjoy each other's company, and meet the current crop of members in the house. Five alums good-naturedly crammed into my apartment with me, and we had such fun, in town and on campus and elsewhere in the state, together.

4. So, not to touch on the previous post too much, but clearly there have been troubles with my neighbors lately. Something positive which has come of that, however, has been a sustained re-examination of my own daily habits and attitudes towards the more prosaic end of St. Paul's most important question: "How then should we live?" And it's been good to revisit behaviors I've taken for granted for years. Most of it isn't really of interest to anyone but me; it's stuff like, for example, when is a reasonable time of the day to do laundry, and when is a considerate time to be doing laundry. Basically, doing laundry at 10pm makes total sense to me, but when some of my neighbors are asleep by then, is it the best choice to make? Likewise, it's helped me reaffirm some behaviors and attitudes which I think are appropriate, like opening windows on sunny days.

5. In a nice amalgamation of work and life, the Reference group was approved to purchase two second-generation iPads, to play with and examine for possible use serving library customers. I was able to have one for a little over a week, taking it over the weekend of Baby Buttered Biscuit, a writers conference for high-schoolers the College sponsors and houses on its mountain, the young adult version of the conference I've written about before on the blog. This past year I've been serving on the baby conference's Coordinating Committee, and the iPad provided great help to me over the weekend, for all the usual book storage and portability reasons, as a handy calculator for the makeshift bookstore when one couldn't be found otherwise, and as a check of local radar so we'd know exactly when to expect the line of thunderstorms on Saturday afternoon. I'm thankful to work somewhere which values technology and is curious about using it well, while remaining skeptical about "obvious" benefits that early adopters can often tout as virtues. I'm not sure how much the iPad will be useful for our jobs as librarians, but it's definitely a fun toy.

6. Touching again on the writers conference, I've been honored by the request to be Assistant Director for next year, which is a little intimidating but also will be enjoyable. Apart, of course, from all the paperwork I'll get to fill out.

7. There's a last thing that's been a great surprise about this semester, but I can't tell you about it, because it's still being figured out, and may not end well. Or may end spectacularly well. I'll spill when I can. Besides, I have to keep you coming back somehow, right?

Neighborly

2011-04-18T18:51:00.001-04:00

I don't like the word. It smacks of the small scroll given to John to eat in the Revelation, where it is honey in the mouth and sourness in the stomach. It is a sanctimonious word, a word which, once invoked, shuts down further comment, and especially further debate. Calling someone neighborly is smothering them with sentimentality, and calling someone unneighborly is like sentencing them to a term in prison without chance of parole. Robert Frost mocked the man who said "good fences make good neighbors," but he still called his poem "Mending Wall" and the phrase is used ironically. While the two men literally mend the gaps and cracks which have appeared in the low wall between their properties, the contact of doing so, meeting with and talking with his neighbor, leads to Frost losing respect for him. Is it true that familiarity breeds contempt? Perhaps in the case of neighbors, yes. For these people aren't our family, where there is love or affection or, at the least, a feeling of blood-belonging. And they aren't our friends or our lover, entirely a choice of association on the part of everyone involved. No, neighbors are in many ways, I am convinced, the scourge of our social lives.

This is an exceedingly unpopular view for a handful of reasons. It is, to be blunt, completely against the spirit of Christianity, which I claim to profess but have only rarely claimed to ever be good at. In fact, in any religion I can think of, being a good person involves being a good neighbor. And being a good neighbor is expedient in any kind of civil society, where the awareness and interconnectedness of neighbors most always leads to safer and cleaner neighborhoods. The benefits of friendships with neighbors are, admittedly, quite practical: they pick up your mail while you're on vacation, they report any odd activity at your house while you're away, they'll let you borrow their snowblower when the engine dies on yours. Sometimes they cook for you, especially when you're sick. They inquire after your health and sympathize with you about the gophers and rabbits that eat your garden. They keep an eye on your kids when they're out in the yard. If they don't see you for days on end and your car hasn't moved, they come over just to make sure you aren't lying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip.

But the secret everyone knows and no one says is that the number of times in one's life, among all the various places that you live over the course of 80-odd years, how often you meet a random neighbor or two whom you not only like personally but get along with enough to trust and care about is, frankly, miniscule to the point of being a scientific anamoly. My father laments that the 1950s were far different in this respect, but not having experienced the 1950s myself, I can't corroborate. His parents did indeed have a decades-long close friendship with the married couple who lived next door, but they're literally the only family members I can think of who had that, and that was the only close friendship they had with any of their neighbors. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down" Frost says, and there's the implication that whatever that is isn't human. He even suggests elves at one point, but then says that isn't quite right. Frost makes fun of his neighbor for the aphorism of good fences making good neighbors, and questions the aphorism in the course of the poem, but doesn't end up negating it. The best he can do at the end of the poem is to offer the neighbor repeating it in a self-satisfying way, and though that's clearly not a proof of its truth, it's neither a proof of its falsity.

Last week an old high school friend I reconnected with through Facebook posted a quote from Mother Teresa as their status: "I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?" My first thought, of course, was that yes, I'm concerned about the guy who lives underneath me - will he wake me up in the middle of the night again because of his excessive snoring and his loud gasping from when he temporarily stops breathing while he's asleep? Yes, I'm concerned about the old man who lives across the landing from me - will he yell at me again because I've opened the landing window on a sunny day to get some fresh air into the building, or will he make another complaint to our landlord about it, or both? Yes, I'm concerned about the other tenant downstairs, who is slowly heading towards a mental breakdown - will the odors coming from her apartment this week just be cooking smells, or will they indicate she's stopped washing herself again? Getting to know my current neighbors has been mainly an exercise in apprehension, wariness, and outright anxiety. For most of the past six months I've been getting frustrated with them, and then getting frustrated with myself for being frustrated. But after a couple of conversations with various people, I'm coming to realize that my apartment building, in its current configuration of people, is simply not a healthy environment.

Mother Teresa doesn't seem to have much to say about this. When a neighbor decides he doesn't like you and complains repeatedly about you to the landlord simply because you enjoy open windows in early Spring, where exactly is the motivation to get to know this man? What happens when a neighbor's emotional and mental issues are far beyond your ability to understand or care for? And I've merely selected the most confusing of a laundry list of odd or hostile characteristics these people exhibit. Lately I've been wondering if the concept of being neighborly was created by extroverts who get so excited around other people, for extroverts who get so excited around other people. I have no wish for my neighbors to come to harm, but mostly I've been thankful when a day passes where I don't have to interact with them, a true introvert's attitude if ever I've heard one. And the other thing I've been thinking about is how over the past decade I've lived in three different apartments, and I've never developed a friendship with any neighbor I've had during that time. But it's not that I regret that, per se. Again, there's a thankfulness associated with it.

Why thankful? Because in my experience, living with other people means that you learn things about them you didn't want to know, things that make you lose respect for them, as Frost did in his poem. Again, there is a difference with family and friends and lovers, but neighborliness does not involve a type of love as far as I can tell. Neighborliness is barely even a word. And I could go into all the various things I've learned about previous neighbors, but that's mean, and not the point of this. The point is, I find it incredibly difficult, historically and currently, to muster up any concern about my neighbors. In my experience, my life has been consistently better the fewer neighbors I've had and the less I've had to interact with them. This feels wrong to me, and yet I can't deny the facts of it.

I also can't deny I'm not the only person out there with these sorts of experiences, and actually, the more people I've spoken with about this, the more stories I've heard of their own bad experiences. The temptation is to say all right then, I should just change my attitude. My neighbors won't bother me, and though it's not necessarily the most realistic way to act, I'll try to conform my behavior, where I can, to adapt to their eccentricities. I've been keeping the landing window closed more often, for example, to try to not anger my neighbor, especially trying to keep it shut when he's around. Apparently it didn't change anything - he recently wrote letters to the other tenants and my landlord asking them to chastise me for my nefarious window habits too.

Days like today are among the days the situation weighs on me. I spent this past weekend housesitting for friends from work, in their lovely little cottage 25 minutes south of Bluebell Town. This morning I stopped by my apartment briefly to drop off my wekeend stuff before heading into work, and things were as I had expected. The building stank. It was clear no one had opened a window all weekend. My own apartment smelled too, as much as I'd tried to seal my front door. My mail had been rifled through. (Yes, I have a neighbor who regularly looks at my mail, though I don't think they've opened anything. One of the reasons why I go home for lunch most workdays is so I can get my mail as soon as it arrives.) But on the plus side, I noticed that a Christmas wreath which one of my neighbors has had on their door since early December had finally been taken down. It's the little things.

It's also remembering a different aphorism than Frost's: "This too shall pass." So far, everyone who's lived in my apartment building has moved on after a year or two, and any animosity they've incurred while they've been here has disappeared when they do. I've never wished any of them to come to harm, it's just I've never wished to continue living in proximity to any of them. But everything changes, and so they move on, or perhaps one day I'll move on, or perhaps one day there will be an actual friendship with one or two of them. I'm not holding my breath, though. From my experience, good fences do make good neighbors. More and more my desire is to have no effect on my neighbors' lives and for them to have no effect on mine.

The Sickness Unto Lent

2011-03-28T20:52:00.002-04:00

I know, I know. I couldn't resist, although Kierkegaard may well be rolling in his grave. Actually, his little book about despair and being a Christian made a profound impact on me when I read it in the summer of 2004. I just had to look up what year it was I read it, which means I should probably read it again sometime soon. Maybe this summer. In any case, the short explanation is that it's been Lent for almost three weeks, and during that entire time, I've been sick, with a cold that turned into a sinus infection.

My mother has always maintained that you can tell a lot about a person when they're sick, and I'd agree with that. For myself, I can't remember a time when I've been ill for three weeks straight (it came on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, so as of today it's been three full weeks). I've had surgeries it's taken me longer than three weeks to recover from, but that's different. I can't recall an actual illness which has lasted within my body for this long. For the first week or so I did what I normally do when I'm sick: power through it, and treat it like it's mostly not there. I took some cold medicine, but usually just before I went to bed. In the winter I sleep with a small humidifier every night anyway, because my apartment has the humidity of a desert during the winter, and so I also brought the humidifier into my living room during the evenings and let it run. During the evenings when I was home, of course, because I didn't really let the cold interfere with my social schedule.

That's how I usually deal with being sick, but this time the cold didn't go away. In fact, as week one became week two, it went from being just a head cold to a rather nasty cough as well, and started including sinus headaches. This started affecting me. I started getting very annoyed with this cold. You know that fuzzy feeling in your brain when you're seriously sick? That became my way of life for most of the past two weeks, and I hated it. I started taking time off from work, as much as I could, and the days I went in because I had to, for various responsibilities I couldn't or refused to delay, were painful. I could feel myself trying to swim, except it was just walking down the hallway: that's what moving forward felt like. One of the mornings I had to go into work I broke a sweat just getting myself dressed. Those days were the last straw (in my slightly addled perspective on things) and I finally went to the doctor. I'm not one of those stereotypical guys who can't stop to ask for directions somewhere, but I am definitely stereotypical when it comes to seeing a doctor when I'm sick. I felt like warm death on toast before I dragged myself to my physician. And before you ask, especially if I've talked with you at some point over the past few weeks, yes, I said "oh yeah, I'm sick, and it's annoying, but I'm fine" to everyone. Because that's what I do. Often when I'm sick, it's true (e.g. the powering-through-it attitude from week 1) but I also have trouble admitting sometimes when I'm really not doing well.

And Lent is, to be frank, a time during the liturgical year to be honest with ourselves and admit that we're not doing well. While I was laying in bed or on my futon, too tired to even listen to music, my mind would wander in the ways it does when you're sick. I don't mean the hallucinations that come with having a fever - that wasn't it. It's the people who appear before your eyes you haven't thought of in years. The things you should have said, should have done. The ways you could have been kinder. When you're sick, the world seems like so much more of a hostile place than it used to, or perhaps it's always been this hostile, but you're ill-equipped (pun intended) to weather it right now. The people you want by your bedside to hold your hand, and I don't mean parents. The small things you should pay more attention to become larger than life. You start praying to God and realize with shame that it's the first time you've prayed in days, or weeks. God doesn't show up, and you feel more alone than ever. No one shows up, and you alternate between self-pity that no one cares and honest thankfulness that no one has to see you like this. You know there's a list of people long as your arm you could call, both near and far, and they'd sit with you, literally or metaphorically, and share your anxiety. But you don't call. You hope against hope your stupid neighbors will just be quiet and let you drift in that haze between lighter and deeper sleep. But what kind of attitude towards other people means these things? You're ashamed all over again.

If you're anything like me, the self-recrimination when you're really sick is something fierce. It's not like depression - I've been through that too - but it's a taste of depression, coming to the cliff and looking into the abyss, and the 10% of your brain that always wonders what it'd be like to throw yourself over becomes 20%. Too exhausted to pray for healing, you just pray for unconsciousness. And saying this may be wrong, theologically; I don't know. But I feel like, looking at the past three weeks, that's a good Lenten prayer. "I understand my brokenness, and I don't want to understand more of it. Please let my mind go dark, let my body collapse. It would be better than the torture of knowing myself too well." Lent asks us to look at ourselves in the mirror and not turn away, and I don't like it, because it's painful. Being sick, especially being sick for a long time, causes us to be still and know that we are fragile. We are exceedingly easy to break, physically, mentally, emotionally. The neglect of our spiritual selves makes us easy to break spiritually, too. And I don't mean to say that I think the point is strength. The point is survival, putting one foot in front of the other in all these ways and moving forward as a whole person.

Most of the past week or so has been like this for me, and sharing it here is harder to do than I thought it would. And what of the people I know who are sick with much worse things, for longer amounts of time? There's the friend of a friend with stage 4 renal cell carcinoma, who should have died last year and could literally die any day. There's the high school friend I reconnected with a couple years ago who has dysautonomia, and every day it feels like her body is trying to kill her. There's the friend here in Bluebell Town who, for well over a year now, has convinced herself so absolutely that she's sick, she's actually become so, with unexplained dizziness, fatigue, blackouts, stomach troubles and rashes all over her body. All three of them my age or younger, all three of them having to struggle with the depression that understandably has come alongside being sick in such serious ways for so long.

"It's a sinus infection," the doctor said. "Antibiotics for a week." Have I mentioned yet that when I'm sick I can be, sometimes, a bit of a drama queen? I'm so blessed, the worst sickness I can point to is a 3-week sinus infection. And so I'm ashamed yet again, but this feels different, feels less like self-pity and more like I'm being put in my proper place in the world, which is a small place. And that too is the reason behind Lent. The doctor's visit happened at the end of last week, and after being on the antibiotics for a few days, I'm getting better. My sinuses are draining, though they aren't drying out yet, and the cough has almost disappeared. When I do cough, it's a medium-sized clearing-your-throat cough, not the garrulous hacking which shook my torso every time it struck. Still with the headaches, but they're decreasing in number and duration. I feel like I'm slowly re-entering the real world. I took a late-night drive last night for the first time since Lent began, and as usual, it was a soothing experience. For me, being alone in the car means, 99% of the time, listening to music loudly and singing along and playing instruments on the steering wheel. My voice, froggy as it is under normal conditions, had improved at least to the point of being able to croak along for a while. For now, that is enough.

I had wanted this Lent to be different, to be special somehow, because I honestly have been neglecting my spiritual growth lately, and I came up with a list of half a dozen different things I was going to do. Two different sets of Lenten readings, one of them with a few friends and sharing thoughts on a blog together, but that hasn't happened. Going to Mass once during the week, and that hasn't happened. Other things which haven't happened. It's frustrating to realize I fell into the vending machine Christianity I get so annoyed with in other people, where you put in your money and then you wait for God to spit out the sugary feel-good treat you requested. Instead I've been given a sinus infection for three weeks. I should be more careful with spiritual growth. I often forget it means suffering. I often forget what Lent really signifies.

Q4: My Ideal Job

2011-03-04T18:31:00.020-05:00

Dan asked, "If you had to work, but could do anything you wanted (so an actual job), what would you be doing?" Well, I've always been amazed at the people who have told me, related to a job or a career, "I'm a ____ (or I'm studying/in training to be a ____) and that's who I am. I can't imagine being anything else." Maybe it's a side effect of the way our education system is set up, with more education making someone more specialized instead of giving them a broader knowledge base, but I've tended to encounter this attitude more in my graduate programs, or among people with advanced degrees, than anywhere else. I'm amazed because although I've had times in my life where I've wanted to have a specific job, I've never associated myself so closely with it that I couldn't see myself doing other things. Even now, not quite a year into my incredibly cool librarian job, if another incredibly cool position, library-related or otherwise, surfaced somewhere else within Bluebell or across the country, I'd seriously consider it.

Within the past decade since graduating from college I've been an office assistant, an on-call temp, a grad student (twice), an undergraduate writing instructor, a campus ministry staffer, a desk manager (4pm-1am), a librarian, a board member for a regional writing conference, a housesitter, and starting last month, a documentary film reviewer for a national library-oriented database, all of them paid positions except the last. According to the most recent general statistics from the Bureau of Labor, which involves a wide cohort of various Americans born between 1957 and 1964, this group had, in the 25-year period between 1983 and 2008, an average of 10 paying jobs per person, with 23% having 14 or more, and 14% having 0-4 jobs. Most estimates of Americans born after the 1960s see those numbers as increasing. Me having 9 paying jobs of varying lengths over a little less than 11 years would seem to support that estimate, and I can point to many friends around my own age who have similar experiences with varieties of jobs. We may not have been excited about all the jobs we've had, but we've been excited about some of them, perhaps even most of them. All the same, "a career," defined as doing one thing for the majority of your working life, is a) less and less an option for Americans, and b) less and less something I and many of my friends really want anyway.

Which brings me to time travel. My ideal job would involve time travel, of a cultural and sociological bent, observing and reporting on both the great and the mundane moments of history. The outrageous costs such a venture would need to support itself (as I wouldn't be charging anyone for access to my reports and experiences) would be funded by also acquiring stock and other investment prices from the future, and selling that information to people, probably only a certain number per month, at sums calculated in a similar way to how we figure out income tax, so those who make less money would be charged less for the information and the wealthy would pay through the nose. Since two of the most distinguishing characteristics of our nation are a fascination with the intricacies of our past and an expectation of wealth in the future, I see this as a rather sure-fire idea for a non-profit.

But Dan was careful to point out that it needs to be "an actual job" so for now, my time-traveling dreams will have to wait. And as you might guess from what I've written so far, there's really no one job out there that excites me most, but rather a general list of things I think I'd really enjoy doing, perhaps short-term, perhaps longer-term. In no particular order, here they are.

1. Academic professor or teacher of some sort. This one was the easiest to think of because I tried it once already. As I've said elsewhere, one of the few really good parts of my grad school degree in literature was the teaching component, two classes of freshman rhetoric & composition and two classes of business writing over two years. Both of my parents, though not professors, were teachers, my mom for over 30 years, and I've always been naturally inclined and environmentally trained to be a teacher. I could see myself giving it another shot and enjoying it, though I admit I'd be loathe to have to go through another degree program to do so. I don't really know in what venue I'd try teaching again - except certainly not K-12 - but maybe one day an opportunity will come along.

2. Newspaper/magazine/book editor. Another no-brainer, because of my own experiences writing for and eventually running my high school's newspaper, and being a go-to guy for various friends through the years on editing papers, speeches, and application essays. Though I'd probably have to work on shortening my often lengthy and rambling sentences as a preparation for helping others to shorten theirs. Online or print wouldn't matter to me so much, either.

3. Investigative journalist. Connected with the editor idea but working from a different perspective, an investigative journalist can go deeply into their story, and the purpose of that kind of reporting is towards an understanding of the people and topic involved, involving not just the facts, ma'am, but an interpretation of them in realistic and provocative ways. Kind of like being an English major, only with real people instead of novels.

4. Reviewer. Books, movies, TV, media & culture in general. Not that I don't already do this for fun anyways, but it'd be neat to have an actual audience outside a personal blog, and to get paid for my opinions. My friend Lovelock writes reviews and other articles for a popular national culture website based in NYC, and I'm half-envious. Only half, because I would enjoy that more as a side job, I think, than as my main bread-and-butter.

5. Archivist. Related to my current job, an archivist selects, purchases, and manages an archive of something someone somewhere considers important enough to keep. Of course, most people (myself included, most likely) don't have the greatest sense of what's worth keeping. So it's a job involving a fair amount of research, the weighing of artefacts which are remarkably similar, and also kind of the ultimate organization job, except maybe for air traffic control. It's one of the overlaps between libraries, especially research libraries, and museums. Which brings me to...

6. Museum curator. Maybe not of a whole museum, but certainly of collections within a museum. Curators sometimes purchase, but always select, arrange, write placards and pamphlets for, and often lead tours of an exhibit or collection. Like being an archivist, it requires an obsessive organizational talent and considerable research into the artefacts and collection on display. And a not inconsiderable joy for me would be the arrangement of the exhibition, which leads on to...

7. Art gallery arranger / Set designer. I'm grouping these two together because I'm not quite sure the first one is an actual job: my basic idea is to be whoever goes into an art gallery and physically determines which painting or sculpture or construction - or all of them - goes next to which, in which rooms, with what lighting, etc. This may be just part of what a gallery director does, and if so, we'll go with that, I guess. A set designer for plays or productions (film, TV) is something I'd also enjoy, though not the construction of said sets, so it would be more about the space and the way the people and art and objects occupy and it. All in all, the underlying aspect of these jobs that I'd like is that they'd fulfill my unreasonable desire to make mix tapes for a living.

8. Director of Photography. In my head, if set design is one side of the coin in media productions (along with lighting design, art design, etc.), the other side is the director of photography, who doesn't operate the camera or direct the scene being filmed, but figures out, usually in tandem with the director, how the scene is to be shot and what the camera is going to do, and is in charge of all the components and staff who work to make that happen: camera, film stock, lights, sound, etc. Sometimes this involves storyboarding, sometimes needing to adapt on the fly, both of which would be fun.

9. Film/TV Writer. Obviously. Film scripts offer bigger budgets to play with and more autonomy on writing full drafts (or re-writing other people's drafts), and TV offers more opportunities to collaborate with a "writer's room" of talented people and sometimes a longer run of multiple seasons to really delve into character development and evolve a storyline in a more convincing way. Similarly...

10. Video game Writer. Different format, different expectations, different tropes, but in many ways (and will become in more ways in coming years) in the same ballpark as writing for the movies. And of course...

11. Writer. As in your standard poet, novelist, short story guy. Again, not as a full-time gig, but part-time, definitely. Basically, I love straight-up creative writing too much to make a career out of it.

12. Campaign Manager. This is probably the one most out in left field. A half-dozen years ago, my uncle, who had been Chief of Police for many years in the town next to the one I grew up in, ran for mayor in that town. First time he'd ever done something like that, and along with the raft of friends, colleagues, and relatives - including my dad - who helped out with the campaign, he hired a brother-sister team as his campaign managers. They planned the events, were liaisons with the media, organized and managed the volunteers, sat the candidate down to figure out his stance on various issues, assisted in writing/editing the candidate's speeches, and crunched data from polls, cold calls, etc. Though my own interest in politics is mostly as an observer, on a local level the process of politics is more interesting to me, because it seems more humane the more local it becomes, "all politics is local" aside. But I would be interested in helping run a local campaign, or even being called into a locality I know little about because they want fresh ideas. (Though I'd want local co-managers as well.) As President Bartlet once said to Josh Lyman, "You know what the difference is between you and me? I want to be the guy; you want to be the guy the guy counts on." There's an appeal for me in that.

I'm sure there's more - radio talk show host, auctioneer, etc., including a strange interest in helping coach a baseball team, though never basketball, football, hockey, or really any other sport - but since we're at a dozen let's stop here. I hope it's realistic for me to say there's always jobs out there I could find to amuse myself. But of course, I'm also quite happy with the one I've got right now, so we'll go with that. If anyone has any other random questions out there, just ask them!

Liveblogging: Oscars 2011

2011-02-27T11:36:00.041-05:00

Since I've never tried the liveblogging thing before, and movies are something I know a fair amount, and I'll be surrounded by a bunch of snarky, witty people during the telecast, let's see what happens. Handles for the others will be created by themselves, so I make no claims about their appropriateness for civil society. Another reason to do this is to snark about Franco, whom I don't dislike, but obviously never took his meds as a child and is usually pretty weird. At the same time, I'm cautiously optimistic about pairing him with Anne Hathaway as hosts. So far, the various promos have been good, even funny. And after Ricky Gervais at the Globes, we need some funny. Join us in a few short hours around 8pm!

7:47pm. Well, we're gathering, and mocking dresses. Truth to tell, most of the dresses have not been impressive to the assembled women, though general consensus is that Marisa Tomei, Scarlett Johansson, and Anne Hathaway's have been great.

7:51pm. Geoffrey Rush looks awesome bald.

7:55pm. We are impressed with how understated Robert Downey Jr.'s suit looks. The man is classy, period.

8:02pm. Whaddaya know, Natalie Portman totally looks pregnant...

8:05pm. The world is coming to an end: Justin Timberlake is wearing a bow tie. Quote of the evening (so far): "Justin Timberlake, color theorist!"--the guy interviewing Justin Timberlake

8:14pm. There is frantic debate in the room right now over Gwyneth's earrings. However, we're all agreed her dress is fantastic.

8:25pm. Reports on movies past from the room. Limoncello: Wait, who's Matthew Broderick? (The room starts throwing out various movies he's been in.) Aznable: He's the voice of adult Simba. Limoncello: Who cares about adult Simba? Aznable: EVERYONE cares about adult Simba!

8:37pm. Amazing opening sequence. Lots of laughs, lots of fun. Alec Baldwin drinking an Ambien juice pouch. "I loved you in Tron." Morgan Freeman's soothing voice. Back to the Future!

8:41pm. Hathaway's mom and Franco's grandma are wonderful. Unanimous in the room.

8:44pm. Limoncello is over the moon about Alice in Wonderland winning Art Direction. Harriet James, sitting next to her, has no use of her right ear at the moment.

8:47pm. Cinematography going to Inception is something I can get behind, especially considering a) such a convoluted movie needed excellent cinematography to keep an audience staying with the plot, and b) Wally Pfister has been nominated four times, and has worked on some fine movies.

8:52pm. L. Roth Kanter, upon seeing Kirk Douglas: Is that the guy who plays Voldemort?

8:54pm. Has anyone ever heard of the movie Animal Kingdom? Certainly no one here...

8:56pm. "Colin Firth is not laughing. He's British." Kirk Douglas will always be cool.

8:57pm. Okay, no one saw Melissa Leo as Supporting Actress coming. We were hoping for Helena Bonham-Carter. But Melissa Leo wins mad points for flirting with Spartacus.

8:59pm. Yes, Melissa, the reason balconies are built are so they can seat people up there. And you really aren't supposed to be swearing on national television... wait, give Kirk his cane back!

9:01pm. Oh, Justin Timberlake. No one would ever think you're Banksy. You know how we can tell? Nobody laughed.

9:06pm. No surprise on Toy Story 3. Well deserved.

9:11pm. Aznable, during a Kindle commerical: "We should all torrent pandas, and then they won't be endangered."

9:14pm. My boy Aaron has won Adapted Screenplay! And he started his speech giving props to Paddy Chayefsky and Network. I am grinning from ear to ear. "He's your boy?" "Yeah, but it's okay." - Sports Night, best TV show ever.

9:19pm. "My father always told me I'd be a late bloomer." Witty and classy. Well done, David Seidler. Original Screenplay to The King's Speech.

9:26pm. Helen Mirren and Russell Brand: favorite presenter pairing of the night so far.

9:35pm. Christian Bale gets Supporting Actor. Most of the room is kind of meh.

9:40pm. "And we made up backstage, so he's once again the wolver to my rine." Anne Hathaway is continuing to impress.

9:43pm. Interesting, the most subtle and even monochromatic film score was the winner. Good on you, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. And another Oscar for The Social Network.

9:47pm. And Inception gets Sound and Sound Editing, which makes sense. Thinking about it, the amount of different sounds and cues in that movie is fearsome.

9:53pm. Yeah, I still have a crush on Marisa Tomei.

9:56pm. Cate Blanchett, on the makeup in the remake of The Wolfman: "That's gross." True words, in many more ways than one.

9:59pm. To be honest, I would have gone with True Grit for Costume Design, instead of Alice in Wonderland. Others in the room would have gone with The King's Speech.

10:02pm. Kevin Spacey, we love you. Can we book you for a solo song-and-dance gig sometime?

10:04pm. Randy Newman, you're a superstar. 20 nominations, and still a good songwriter. Mandy Moore, you're a peach, but why did you dress like Mystique?

10:16pm. L. Roth Kanter would like you all to know that there's a sniper on the roof outside the theater, who will shoot any winner who does not thank the Academy in their speech.

10:18pm. Auto-Tune Harry Potter for the win. Wait, Auto-Tune Social Network for the win! No, no. The one moment associated with Twilight we were actually excited to see: He Doesn't Own a Shirt. We knew those stupid books and movies were good for something.

10:29pm. Billy Crystal, stay classy. You're still the best Oscars host ever.

10:32pm. Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, bickering on stage about being arrogant and women in superhero costumes. I can't wait for the Sherlock Holmes sequel this December.

10:34pm. Wait, did he just thank all of Canada? Really? Canada?!

10:37pm. The two editors who just won for Inception are totally closet bros.

10:42pm. You know, I have to hand it to the Academy. After the drubbing they got for mandating all original song nominees to perform clips of the songs last year, they decided to have all the songs performed in full this year. But really, whose idea was it to give Gwyneth that awful white mic?

10:52pm. Dion alert! Run, hands over ears! Run, run!

10:57pm. I've always really liked how the Academy has commemorated the passing of noted practicioners of the art of movie-making. Very classy to end this year's list with Lena Horne, and with Halle Berry honoring her.

11:02pm. Tom Hooper wins Best Director for The King's Speech. We are pleased. We are pleased with his "triangle of man-love." But don't diss Helena Bonham-Carter, man. She'll go psycho on your ass.

11:08pm. Wallach, Godard, Brownlow, Coppola. A worthy company.

11:16pm. Did anyone not know Natalie Portman would win Best Actress? The question I wonder is: why do they insist on showing the most emotionally wrenching clips for this category? Seriously, every single year. (Something Muffin says "She's mad pregs!")

11:22pm. Wait, Jesse Eisenberg has inspired lonely young men hunched over keyboards around the world? Damn. It's like Sandra Bullock knows exactly what I'm doing right now...

11:25pm. Colin Firth is dry and witty and a gentleman. Congratulations on a well-earned Oscar for Best Actor. Blitz came in the door as it was happening: "F-- yeah, I just won five bucks from my mother!" L. Roth Kanter: "Why is 'Colin Firth' spelled 'J-e-f-f-B-r-i-d-g-e-s'?"

11:35pm. Really cool montage of Best Picture nominees, very well done. Kind of stacking the deck a bit, though, putting all the other movies within the context of The King's Speech... and it won, as we all knew it would. Fair enough. Though I couldn't endorse it as an accurate portrayal of history, it was a great buddy film, confidently directed, well written, and the three leads acted the hell out of it. Bravo.

11:40pm. Little children from NYC singing. Eesh. Good thing it's at the end of the show. Nice song choice, at least. Harriet James: "I'm surprised the stage itself hasn't turned into a rainbow yet." Uncle Louie: "Why is this happening? This has no relevance to anything!" Napoleon Dynamite: "Oh, snap - let's bring out the famous people now..."

And we're out. Franco and Hathaway get a thumbs-up, as a rather low-key but friendly duo. Franco always feels a little wooden, but Hathaway did a great job offsetting that with honest enthusiasm which wasn't syrupy. No real upsets, unless perhaps Melissa Leo for Supporting Actress and Trent & Atticus for Score for The Social Network. Though, nothing for True Grit, which is too bad, because it was a fine film. Regardless, a fun time was had by all. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you at the movies!

Q3: Doctrine and Personal Agency in the Catholic Church

2011-02-23T18:13:00.004-05:00

This question comes from a friend who emailed me recently, and said I could put her questions on the blog if I wanted to. So what follows is an edited version of both her questions and my reply to her, which was over email and a little more personal and detailed than what I'll post here. Where useful I'll quote her actual words.

"How do you reconcile tough points of disagreement with the Catholic Church?" My friend and her fiancé are getting married in the Catholic Church and were attending pre-marriage counseling, which most Christian denominations require before they'll consent to perform your wedding. "While there, [the priest] asked us a bunch of questions, one of which was whether either of us had any physical disabilities that would prevent us from consummating our marriage." They didn't and said so, and then asked "if our answer to that question would have affected our eligibility to get married in the Catholic Church. We were both absolutely astounded that the answer was 'yes'--based on the premise that marriage is both a spiritual and a physical bond between a husband and a wife. In fact, the priest said that if either of us was, say, paraplegic or disabled in some way, he'd have to petition to the bishop for us to get married, and even so it was not a guarantee. The thought of this made me so sad--perhaps because it said to me that faith isn't enough to be Catholic." In addition, my friend's fiancé's father was baptized in the Greek Catholic Church (an Eastern Catholic denomination following the Byzantine Rite, still Catholic but different from the Roman Catholic Church that we in the West think of as "the Catholic Church"), and when you're Greek Catholic, your religious identity is passed down from your father. So the Catholic Church recognizes the fiancé as Greek Catholic, because his father was, even though he doesn't consider himself Greek Catholic. My friend writes about this: "Again, I had a strange and unpleasant feeling inside of me. Maybe I just don't understand the Catholic Church despite having been raised in it: What is the role of individual agency in the (Roman) Catholic faith? Perhaps that's too broad to answer, so maybe just starting with your personal understanding could be a good answer."

Here's almost all of what I wrote in my reply: So, reconciling tough points of doctrine in the Catholic Church with being a practicing Catholic. I suppose my first thought is that doctrine doesn't make a Christian, of any denomination, though certainly doctrine separates many Christians from each other. Faith is enough to make a Christian; the Catholic Church (CC), as most any denomination I can think of, recognizes that the possibility of a deathbed conversion exists. As in, all your life you've not believed in Christ or lived as a Chrisitan, but in the time before you die, you do so, and are saved. The CC kinda prefers that you also get baptized (which in that kind of extreme circumstance any Catholic can perform; it doesn't need to be a priest) but that's just because the CC can get a little too hung up on doctrine.

Which is my second thought: it's a delicate line to walk as a Catholic sometimes, stricter than Protestants by and large, because the CC is the only denomination to believe that both Scripture and Tradition are God-given for living a Christian life in the world. With the Tradition of the CC you get the magisterium, which over the centuries have built up a number of received truths and doctrines which are not explicit in Scripture, but are implicit or, rarely, not found there. However, to my knowledge none of what the magisterium has as doctrine is against Scripture. But sometimes it can feel like a lot of old unmarried priests over the years making decisions that don't have much to do with real life. Statistics show, for example, that American and European Catholics show no or very little difference from the secular citizenry in terms of birth control. Sexually active Catholics, in or outside of marriage, use birth control at just about the same rates as non-Christians. Would I use birth control in my marriage? Probably. Do that mean I'm not as morally correct as the CC would like me to be? Probably. Will that be on the list of sins I have to take before God when I die? Maybe, maybe not.

As an old priest friend liked to say about himself, and I would say to describe me as well, "I'm not burdened with the heavy yoke of perfection." That line of Christ's, "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," has always troubled me, as I think it should, because I can't attain perfection - I'm a fallen human being. But I think striving is the key. The process of being purified doesn't seem to result in purification in this earthly life, only in the heavenly one. Would I use brith control? Yes. But I also don't look down on anyone for using it, or for choosing to not use it. Not that the one cancels out the other. But real life is often more complex than any doctrine, and that's all right, because that's the truth of being human. And God, if we believe he has wisdom beyond our own, must understand that and must be able to sort out the details with compassion towards us, because we're finite creatures. We'd have no need of grace if we were perfect in this life.

I will challenge you a little bit on the specific two points you mentioned: that of needing special permission, if one spouse is, say, a parapalegic, to get married in the CC; and also of the CC taking your fiancé as a default Greek Catholic Christian. I don't mean to be glib or tease you here, but do you honestly want the CC to say that marriage without sex is a real marriage? Regardless of how fun and emotionally bonding it can be, it would be denying that our sexual organs, our sexual drives, and the act of intercourse itself is, frankly, not good. It would be saying the body is not as important as the mind, and as important as the spirit, which is exactly one of the heresies (Gnosticism, in its general term) that the CC battled against in the centuries following Christ. Often people accuse the CC of being children-focused, as saying that the point of sex really is children and nothing else. And sometimes the CC has fallen into that error, sadly. At the same time, to the CC's credit, they have always championed the having of children as an unqualified good, which Scripture does claim it to be. Is a marriage not a real marriage if there are no children? No, the CC doesn't say that. But, when the sexual organs are impaired, through accident or through birth defect, the CC claims it needs to take a closer look at the relationship to see if that person's marriage can happen in the CC. Is it invasive? Yes, and somewhat distressingly so. At the same time, I think I can see why, doctrinally, it's necessary. And I think an argument can be made against the invasiveness of the practice, but I do think the doctrine itself, that sex is necessarily part of Christian marriage, is correct.

The splintering of the denominations is a very sad thing, and I think it saddens God as well. It is one of the unhappy realities of the fallen world we live in and have made for ourselves. I can understand how it may hurt that, even though your fiancé has received the Sacraments of Initiation (Baptism, First Communion, Confirmation), that they were in "another" form of Catholicism they somehow aren't as valid. I think your fiancé would have the option to be "re-baptized" and the rest in the CC, right? I know I'd be annoyed if I had to "do over" sacraments. But I also think it may be a sign of respect, that the CC says "Look, this is how the Greek Catholics choose to define their identity, and how it passes to their children, and we have to recognize that. If you want to be one of us, you'd have to define your identity the way we do." The situation itself, of fragmentation and separation, is awful. But I do think the CC is dealing with that situation in an honest and respectful way, even if it's also a little painful. It hasn't always been this wise - forced conversion happened all the time, pretty much up through the Crusades, and not just from the CC. But as a Church we're wiser now and, by God's grace, we will be even wiser in the future. The process of being purified. And that brings me back to the whole Scripture and Tradition thing. I see Tradition as a hopeful thing, as a real ackowledgment that God continues to inspire humanity and that we, as a Church, as the human race, can grow and become better at loving God and loving each other. It's one of the reasons I have remained Catholic, this equating of Tradition with Scripture as a guideline for our lives. And I disagree with some of it, and don't follow some of it, and don't understand a lot of it, but I understood perfectly and acted perfectly, how could I have faith? And what good would faith do me?

The same priest who had that other quote I mentioned would also say "I'm Catholic because I think it's the boat with the least number of holes in it." And that's true for me. I need to cross the water, all the boats have holes, and when I push off from the shore I don't know what the ocean has waiting for me. You mentioned the huge can of worms that is "individual agency." We could talk the rest of our lives and not come to the end of a debate about that, but one thing I do firmly believe is that we not only have the power and authority over ourselves to choose a boat, we must choose, sometime. And there's no guarantee we'll only have to choose once, but there is a guarantee that we will have to choose at least once. Because our only sure thing in life is that we die. Something happens when we die. Maybe that something is that nothing happens: materialism. But we have to choose what we think it will be, and that choice will necessitate other choices about how we live our lives. We may be able to say other things about individual agency - how it works, how it is influenced, etc. - but at bottom, the reality of human life must lead us to say that individual agency exists, and we must exercise it.

Q2: If I Could Change One Day

2011-02-06T21:59:00.006-05:00

The end of January and beginning of this month turned out to be busier than I had thought they'd be, plus I was sick for over a week in there, so I apologize to Dan for only getting to his question now. He asked: "If you could pick one day from your life to relive - either to enjoy it again or to change the outcome - would you and which day?" I've given this a fair amount of thought and am somewhat surprised by my honest answer. Of course most days of my life I wouldn't change: I feel very lucky to have happened to have been born in this country, in the general time period I live in, with the social and educational opportunities I've been given, with parents who love me and tried, as I grew up, to put my needs before theirs. I feel blessed in my friendships over the years, not only with peers but with men and women of all ages, personalities, cultures, and temperaments. I feel blessed in the mentors, spiritual and intellectual, I've been given the chance to learn from. But there is something I would go back and change, given the chance.

1990 was an important year for me. I was 12 years old for most of that year, turning 13 and entering 7th grade that fall, which in my neck of the woods was the beginning of junior high. In sixth grade I had first realized there was an overly social aspect to life and school. That may sound late for such a realization, and perhaps it was, but I'll comment that I was an only child growing up in a neighborhood of few kids, and none of those were people I went to school with. Of course I did most of the usual kid things - birthday parties with friends, after-school clubs; I was even in a bowling league for three years. Once a year my dad and I would plan a "big" trip (Niagra Falls, D.C. for the monuments and Smithsonian, New York for one of the big parades, the Freedom Trail in Boston) and one or more of my friends would be invited to come, and we always had a great time. But the idea of being part of a social milleu, made up of social moments and events, had never really sunk in for me until sixth grade. And seventh grade was when the wheels started clicking into place. I made more friends, of both sexes, especially friends of different backgrounds and with different interests, and became a more social person generally. Instead of simply enjoying popular culture I started thinking about why I enjoyed this movie or that TV show, and why my family watched x kind of entertainment and not y. And of course, there was a girl.

She was gorgeous, with long, dark hair and deep brown eyes, and she was the smartest girl in my class. We were friends and actually got along pretty well, but it was clear that she was on my mind a lot more than I was on hers. Once we traded books we thought the other might like: she gave me a Dean Koontz novel called "Lightning" which was a time-travel story and I did like it, while I gave her the thing I'd just finished reading and thought was so great, which was the worst-written and least memorable of Doyle's four Sherlock Holmes novels, "The Valley of Fear." I don't think she bothered finishing it, understandably, and that was the end of our book exchange. But here's the thing. I can't remember a day this happened, or even articulating it clearly to myself until the start of eighth grade the following year, but sometime in that quiet autumn of 1990 I decided that she was the best girl I knew, and even if she wasn't interested in me, I was still going to be interested in her. It was very Romantic; I was a budding literature major even then and that's before I'd read Poe or Hawthorne, Blake or Wordsworth & Coleridge, and long before I read Emerson and Baudelaire. But I had my pedestal, and I had set my object of affection upon it. The only thing missing was a spotlessly clean glass case. Of course nothing ever happened between us, and I grew wistful from afar, with all the melodrama only a teenage boy can invent. (There was, for example, a particularly painful period when she dated one of my best friends for a few months.)

And if this had been a phase, a passing attempt at one way to interact - if it truly could be called interacting - with a girl I was crushing on, it wouldn't signify much of anything. But it became my default mode towards girls I liked in high school and college, where I have to say, looking back, it did me more damage than I would like to admit in a public forum like this. "Tunnel vision" might be another good way to describe it: I liked this one girl, and therefore could never be interested in anyone else for any reason. Until the next girl I liked came along. But that often took years, very literally years. I spent three in high school crushing on my best friend, and that actually wasn't so bad. I learned a lot about what love is and love isn't, important lessons I still lean on in my relationships. And we've remained friends, though our lives are very different now. Where this attitude hurt me the most, however, was in college, where I spent over three years pursuing one girl who, as time would later tell, wasn't worth that kind of investment. Meanwhile I rejected or flat-out didn't notice literally a half-dozen other women who were interested in me. And the lessons I learned after all of that are important ones in understanding who I am today.

After college and in grad school my attitudes about relationships changed quite a lot, for several reasons but mostly because I started actually dating women instead of just crushing on them. I was very much a late bloomer, but better late than never. Still, there are lessons about relationships I would've liked myself to have learned earlier. Maybe that's a foolish perspective, but I have to admit I do feel that way. So there isn't a specific day I can point to, but let's paint a picture of a blustery November day in 1990. It's mid-November, just when you're starting to think about Thanksgiving coming up and just when it's starting to get cold in the afternoons before the sun has set. There's a younger, junior-high version of myself sitting on the front steps of school with a book, my backpack beside me. My school had a wide stone staircase of at least a dozen steps, and I'm up near the top. It's quiet outside and I'm focused on my book. I've stayed after to help with the yearbook and I'm waiting for Mom to pick me up. The 2011 me goes up and sits beside that kid and says "Listen, I know who you're thinking about. And don't get me wrong; she's great, really. But she's not the only girl who is. In fact, there's a few other amazing girls you have classes with every day. Look around at them sometime." I'd like to think a younger me might be grateful for those words. The older me would get up to leave, go down the steps, stop at the bottom and turn. "Oh, and one more thing. Smash that pedestal. No woman you'd actually want to be with could live on top of it." I don't know if the 13-year-old me would really get that, really understand. But maybe it would stick somewhere, and perhaps some aspects of my high school and college life might have been different and, possibly, better.

There are plenty of days in my life I'd love to relive because of how wonderful they were, but given the opportunity to change something, that's what I'd change. Oh yeah, and back in fifth grade when my parents encouraged me to take piano lessons? I would have asked for drums instead.

Q1: Women's Literature High School Course

2011-01-14T12:57:00.015-05:00

Hi Cara! Welcome to Sounding Plumbline. A fun question - when I was a teacher myself for a couple of years in grad school I grew to really like designing syllabi, though I should add a caveat that I've never taught high school and don't really have a great sense of what's age appropriate or where their critical thinking skills are. I tended to assume too much innate proficiency with the students I've taught, so please take everything I suggest with a grain of salt. You said "I'm particularly looking for contemporary essays about feminism or feminist theory to spark discussion, literary works that mark turning points, or anything you could attach a compelling discussion/essay question to." So that's what I'm jumping off from.

I'm going to infer from your question that "contemporary" means within the last 50 years or so, encompassing the second and third waves of feminism. Whether we're in a fourth is disputed and hasn't really caught on as an idea; the revision of "feminist studies" into a "women & gender studies" model in the mid-1990s offers more of a unified front of study in the academy, but is more fragmentary in the real world. As feminism has been mixed in more with queer studies, cultural studies, Latino/a studies, and a couple others, it has grown in terms of academic legitimacy (and so its growth in literary theory has been steady) but has become muddled and, some would say, lost ground in the daily life and consciousness of the average American, male or female. Every so often a "new feminism" will emerge, moreso in Newsweek and Time and The New Yorker articles than in academic discourse, and the most important of these has been the cultural shift in the last decade or so towards marriage and motherhood as stabilizing and empowering and satisfying forces within a woman's life. Sometimes that's coupled with balancing a career, sometimes not. Alongside this, the pro-choice movement has gradually been losing some ground among the next generation of American women, and numbers of older women (ie. in their 30s and 40s) becoming mothers for the first time have been going up. Part of this is a result of the median age for marriage for both sexes steadily increasing since the early 1970s, from 21 for women and 23 for men to 26 for women and 28 for men. Advances in reproductive technologies have also aided this trend. So all that to say, we are still waiting for theories to suss out what "feminism" means for the current and upcoming generation, and to my knowledge there haven't been any books written, especially fiction, which have really captured the sense of what "being a feminist" means in the past 15 years or so. So that's why there's very few things I feel like I can give you as "turning points" or as vitally important writings from 1995-present.

In terms of literature (fiction, non-fiction, essay), a place to start is some excerpts from The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, published in 1963. Something about housewives and their feelings of not being in control of their lives would probably make more sense to high schoolers than her critiques of Freud and Margaret Mead. She gets into Kinsey's stats and such too, which if you've got a mature group of juniors and seniors you could try. Gloria Steinem's work during the late 60s and early 70s would also be useful: I'd recommend her 1969 essay "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" which appeared in New York, and her 1970 essay in Time called "What it Would Be Like if Women Win." Steinem was associated with the Redstocking movement and their Redstocking Manifesto might also be good. If you can track it down, there's a 1970 collection of second-wave writings called Sisterhood is Powerful, long out of print at this point. There were two subsequent volumes which also might help as feminism continued to morph and change: 1984's Sisterhood is Global and 2003's Sisterhood is Forever, which are both still in print. While we're on compilations, there's always the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves from 1976 and the second version, same title, from 1998, and the third, from 2005. These compilations are more factually-based than essay-based, and deal primarily with women's health and wellbeing issues. For a bit of a corrective to these anthologies, which focus very much on Caucasian women, you can look at any of the three editions of This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa; the latter also wrote a seminal theoretical/autobiographical essay in Latino/a studies, called "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza" in 1987.

The modern classic feminist novel is still Margaret Atwood's dystopian The Handmaid's Tale, from 1985. Barbara Kingsolver is often referred to a feminist writer as well, though she has never really defined herself as such; her two most important novels are 1988's The Bean Trees and 1998's The Poisonwood Bible. If you only have a quarter for the course, novels are probably less central anyways.

Within literary theory there's a richer variety of options, though how much high schoolers will be able to process and articulate perspectives on some of these is questionable. I say that knowing that even in grad school, it was sometimes hard for my fellow students and I to even understand in any kind of practical way what these writers were advocating for or against. Adrienne Rich would be a good person to use - especially if your students might find her poetry more accessible than her essays. bell hooks (the intentionally uncapitalized pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins) is essential, and her most important book is called Ain't I a Woman? but she's also written a couple dozen other books since, mostly about various aspects of society and women, and usually has interesting things to say, or debate about. Another crucial development in feminist theory and its reshaping of itself more broadly is Judith Butler's 1989 book Gender Trouble. I'll get flak from grad school friends for including this next book under a theory section, but Naomi Wolf's 1991 The Beauty Myth is fundamentally theoretical and ideological, but couched in a popular culture critique which inherits much from Betty Freidan's methods especially once she founded Ms. magazine. Likewise, Astrid Henry responds to Wolf and gives some good snapshots of the difficulties currently in feminist studies, between theory and practice, and between second and third wave, in her 2004 book Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism. Various other important feminist theory essays include "The Laugh of the Medusa" by Hélène Cixous in 1975, Annette Kolodny's "Dancing Through the Minefield" from 1980, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" by Donna Haraway in 1985, and Gayarti Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" from 1988.

Again, I've approached your question mostly in terms of cultural critique and theory. In terms of less ideologically focused novels and stories, there's always things like Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping, which as you saw I read and thought highly of this past year. But I don't personally have lots of experience with fiction in general after the 1960s, much less fiction written by women or concerning lives of women during that time. That's just my own gap of knowledge - in college and grad school I gravitated much more towards American and British fiction of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. So most of the important fiction of the previous and current generation I haven't read yet. But I hope this is helpful in some way, to give you some ideas of what you could use and where you could look for more possibilities. Good luck!

To the rest of you, let's have some more questions!

Go Ahead, Ask Me Anything

2011-01-12T12:17:00.001-05:00

As you may have guessed but I might as well say, I'm pretty well out of ideas for this thing, and have been for the better part of half a year. I enjoy blogging, but I seem to have less and less to say. That's odd because I can talk for hours on end if you allow me. So I'm wondering if a kick-start would be helpful. And that's where you come in. Whether you're a longtime reader or this is your first visit, ask me something. It can be serious, or personal, or silly, or quirky, or whatever. It can be related to my interests, which I've often written about here, or it can be completely unrelated. "You know, I've always wanted to ask Steve what he thinks about _____." I say: go for it. Post a question as a comment to this post - be anonymous if you like - and I'll answer it in a separate post. Or at the very least, if I can't answer it, I'll tell you why I can't. (Note: math problems will likely be answered in this way.)

Top 15 Books of 2010

2010-12-21T11:24:00.004-05:00

I think I can now safely call this a trend. When I was in school, American and British fiction was my bread and butter, and I have two degrees in English literature to show for that. When I left grad school seven years ago, that prediliction continued, as well as a renewed interest in Christian literature, both fiction (mostly 19th Century or earlier) and essay-based (mostly 20th Century), as I was working for a Christian non-profit group at the time. I also started reading more widely into world literature and philosophy. Around 2008, however, I began noticing that more and more of the books I was attracted to came back to being American in focus, but were non-fiction, in the realms of history or sociology or cultural commentary. This was also when poetry was becoming more important to me, both in terms of reading and writing, so I didn't pay much attention to the non-fiction slant at the time. But over the past three years non-fiction has been growing in the amount I've been reading, and in how high up in my top lists it's been appearing. In this year's list, 8 of my 15 titles are non-fiction of some kind, including the four books at the head of the class. Of course the line between fiction and non-fiction, especially in certain genres like memoir or cultural history, is more fluid than most non-English majors realize, but still, after I culled this year's list I looked at it in a minor amazement at how my reading has changed over the past decade. It's one of the main reasons I do these lists, to have some self-organization and self-reflection, to see things it's harder to see at ground level, in the thick of it. On to this year's list! I read 58 books this year, so the top 15 represent the top 25% or so.

title - author - year published

15. Money (Art of Living series) - Eric Lonergan - 2009
The Art of Living series is published by Acumen and each book takes a broadly based concept (e.g. Faith, Work, Happiness, Science, Death, Middle age, Deception) and gives a humanist of some stripe with significant life experience in the topic free reign to explore it. I read three this year and hope to read more. Money made this year's list because of the unique perspective of Lonergan, an investment fund manager who read PPE at Oxford and also has a master's in economics and philosophy. His main idea is that to understand money we need to understand its philosophical uses and implications, and makes a convincing argument overall, though I don't agree with every one of his points. The amount of time I spend thinking about money is rather minimal, and the book encouraged me to do more and deeper thinking about it.

14. Islands of the Mind - John R. Gillis - 2004
Gillis, a historian now retired from Rutgers, wrote this book to explore a concept I've seen explored almost nowhere else: how islands, as a physical reality and emotional construct, fit into the Western imagination from medieval times to today. He shows how islands have swung back and forth on a pendulum of being scary, forbidden and cursed places to joyful earthly (and even heavenly) paradises and back again, from outposts of poor civilization to highly prized escapes for the wealthy, always with an undertone of the mythic and dangerous. Though the book could have been shorter (he repeats himself often, as if many of the chapters had been individual essays he pasted together to make the book), it was a thoughtful read. Plus, the very first research interview I had with a professor at Bluebell after becoming a librarian involved me seeing it on her list of potential sources for the book she was writing. I was able to give her an extended summary and critique of where within her project it might be useful, so whoever said reading "for pleasure" doesn't assist elsewhere in one's life can stuff it.

13. Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century - Michael Dumanis & Cate Marvin, eds. - 2006
I think I mentioned this book somewhere in my summertime posts as an anthology of contemporary poets I wanted to read. Well, I did, and it confirmed my feeling that most of today's poetry is crap because it's mind-numbingly self-centered, or shallow, or obscure, or a mix of all three. The premise of the anthology was to gather poems from poets who had been born after 1960 and published after 1995 and had no more than 3 books when the collection was made. These parameters, which seemed reasonable to me at the beginning, didn't result in as much diversity of content and voice as I'd hoped, though it did lead me to explore the work of more than a dozen poets I found interesting, such as Spencer Reece (whose The Clerk's Tale narrowly missed this year's Top 15), Oni Buchanan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Natasha Trethewey. And truthfully, most of the poetry of any culture and time period is crap; the trick is finding the poets who can understand an emotion and articulate it well.

12. The Inimitable Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse - 1923
The second collection of Jeeves & Wooster stories, collected and arranged by Wodehouse from pieces which had appeared in The Strand in 1921 and 1922, and highly enjoyable. I'm reading one Jeeves & Wooster collection or novel each year, and the broad, good-natured, gentle humor Wodehouse employs as if it were the air he breathed is simply a delight. The usual suspects are here: Bingo Little, always falling in love with the last girl he sees; Claude and Eustace, the troublemaking twin dandies; the Glossops, with their many neuroses and their "sporty" daughter; Sir Roderick Spode, the wannabe fascist dictator; and of course aunts of all shapes and sizes, all ancient, all meddlesome, all a terror to poor Bertie Wooster. And Jeeves always saves the day.

11. Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918 - Brian Gardner, ed. - 1964
Gardner successfully recast what was important in World War I poetry in this edited volume, which, while maintaining the supremacy of the accepted cadre of "important" poets (Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, Graves, Jones, Rosenberg et al.), focused on surrounding them with a cloud of witnesses, men who may not have written grand, sweeping statements about the war, but got a lot of the little details right, snippets of quiet poetry from the line, from the bunker, from the fields, from the ghastly psychological effects people back home couldn't understand. Gardner was instrumental in bringing a more democratic vision to poetry of the Great War, including many who had been, at the time, nearly forgotten, such as Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, John Peale Bishop, Maurice Baring, Francis Ledwidge, R.E. Vernede, and Ewart Alan Mackintosh. The collection is excellent if you want an introduction to the lay of the land of World War I poetry, and also, in its way, to the Western Front of World War I itself.

10. Finding the Gossamer - Patrick Hicks - 2008
On a tip from a trusted friend who teaches at the same school as Hicks, I picked up this slim volume of poetry. It's a miniature masterpiece of ruminations on the firmness of place, of history, and their influence on our imaginative minds, restrictions of life which unfetter our personalities, our comprehension of the world, and our souls. Hicks is the rare autobiographical poet who treats himself as a work in progress, something to be searched for and understood, only in pieces. Even when he doesn't understand his life, he believes there is understanding to be found, and that small but bright spark animates his poetry into expressing the sublimity in everyday experiences.

9. All My Pretty Ones - Anne Sexton - 1962
Maybe part of why I have such trouble enjoying much of contemporary poetry is because of how the confessional mode has seeped, insidious, into every pore. The confessional poetry I do tend to be moved by is often either, like Patrick Hicks', directed outwards towards a better understanding of the self in the world, or like Anne Sexton's, bluntly and baldly and entirely confessional. It's not a crutch for understanding the self; the self is the crutch and the poetry is the attempt at understanding. At this point I've read over half the poems published before her suicide, and while not every single poem affects me, I've not found a book of them which hasn't.

8. Love is a Mixtape - Rob Sheffield - 2007
I mentioned this book before, when it was the impetus for my reminiscences about pop music in high school. As I said in that post, this book is about Sheffield's late wife and the music they loved together. They met in the late 80s, and were married until she died of an embolism quite suddenly in 1997. Personally it brought back lots of memories for me of high school, 1992-96, and the music I and my friends discovered and loved and shared and fought over during that time. But the book itself is really well done, funny and humble, with the author still in love with his wife and still letting her go. Renee, as a character in the book, feels like a real person, as conveyed by someone who knew her as much as one person can know another. At times I felt like she was one of the planet's best people, at other times she was someone I knew I could never put up with, and through it all she was presented as a real woman with a real personality and real emotions. Sheffield should be proud of himself for honoring her memory this way. It's a great read, especially if, like me, you grew up during and/or loved pop and alternative music during those years.

7. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson - 1980
People have been recommeding Robinson to me for years, and so I decided to start with her first novel, a haunting, strange story of three generations of women in one family. Plotwise, two young sisters are taken to live with various female relatives in Idaho when their mother kills herself in the 1950s, and eventually are cared for by their mother's wayward, eccentric sister. But that tells you almost nothing about what the novel's about, other than the coming-of-age of two sensitive, quiet girls. The adjective of a "poetic prose" style is thrown about rather carelessly, but frankly it applies to this novel, as Robinson's words are like a scultped stream of consciousness, innocuous in bits and fragments but coalescing together to form a tightly interconnected web of allusive meaning. The ending moved me in an odd way, in a way which rarely happens to me: I completely and unequivocally disagreed with the climactic choice the narrator (one of the young sisters) makes in the end. Without losing any sympathy for her, and understanding (I think) her choice, I couldn't agree with it. Which made this book linger in my thoughts for weeks afterwards.

6. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s - Donald Worster - 1979, revised 2004
One of the early books of environmental history, Worster, a professor at U Kansas, focuses on the dust storms and drought of the Great Depression on the plains and investigates the natural and human ecology involved: why the Plains were so susceptible to disaster at the time, what happened during, after, and in the second edition, what's been happening since, in terms of agriculture, agribusiness, and environmental concerns about both. Certainly not everyone's cup of tea, I found it fascinating, well researched, insightful, and pointedly balanced in terms of the things farmers and government did right by the Earth as well as what they did wrong. Sadly, it looks like we as a nation have not particularly learned the lessons Worster hoped we would, in terms of irrigation and farm subsidies, to name just two areas. For someone interested in the Great Depression like me, the environmental and agricultural impact was a missing piece in my general knowledge.

5. Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor - 1965
A sad day: I have no more of of O'Connor's fiction left to read. But, I have her letters and essays left to tackle, which is promising. The stories in this collection, her second and last, were mostly written during her final illness, and the collection was published posthumously. Not surprisingly, the stories are darker, while just as rich in suggestive meaning and stark spirituality. And of course the characters are always Southern, often Gothic in manner if not in actuality, and involve black and white, the physically and emotionally lame, the passive-aggressive and aggressive, those outside the law and those who believe they create their own law, and God in all His mysterious and grotesque appearances in our world. Always provocative, always indicting to me as a Christian and always giving me hope, it is a blessing - albeit one passing strange - to have O'Connor's art in our world.

4. Home: A Short History of an Idea - Witold Rybczynski - 1986
Rybczyski, a professor of architecture at McGill and U Penn who, now in his retirement, often writes online for Slate, takes the reader on a tour of the domestic home across cultures and history, West and East. But instead of tackling this chronologically and focusing on architecture itself, he approaches his subject, which is actually the changing idea of domestic comfort, from a number of contributing factors, like light, air, ease of living, privacy, family dynamics, and efficiency. So while there's an overall sense of mostly moving forward in time through the book, the ideas which all come together to make the modern home pop up in sections and are taken through their respective histories. Done poorly this makes for endless treading and re-treading of ground, but Rybczynski is a gifted conversationalist and very adept at talking about his discipline from an everyman angle, making architecture seem more like his passion and hobby rather than his work. I know of no other book which addresses architecture from this perspective, though I'd be excited to find more.

3. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s - Frederick Lewis Allen - 1931
If you're getting the sense that I like non-fiction writers who combine expertise with a general knowledge base and cultural history awareness, that's perceptive. Only Yesterday was the best historical book from that kind of writer I've found this year, and as you can guess from the listing, it's a story of the 1920s written very very close after they finished, while the country was in the Great Depression but before it had really realized it. (The last chapters of Allen's book document the Great Crash but, as the market had volatility throughout 1928-1931, the Crash is seen as the worst instance, but not as a certain harbinger of stagnation which would last most of a decade.) But a glimpse of "recent" history from Allen, a Harvard grad who worked as various editors at the Atlantic Monthly, then Century, then Harper's throughout the Teens and Twenties, is a treat, as he's someone who was often the front lines of national commentary and trends.

It's also fascinating to see, along with chapters on Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles, the Red Scare (part 1, as we now know), the rise of radio, Prohibition, gangsters, and the revolution in manners, morals, and literature led by Northeastern elites, chapters on things vastly less important to our understanding of the decade 90 years later, such as Teapot Dome and the other Harding scandals, the Florida land grab, American business culture becoming globally dominant, and Calvin Coolidge as, well, anything. It's very funny how often, in bits and pieces, he comes back to the subject of women's hemlines, which he swears are a solid indicator for the general moral tenor of the nation throughout the decade as they rise and fall. Still, Allen is clear that he's writing about popular history just as much as about government, politics, unions, and national figures like Al Capone and Charles Lindbergh. For all his closeness to the events he's writing about, he has a remarkably cool-headed reasonableness towards almost all of what he discusses, from the isolationist zeitgeist of America to the creation of crossword puzzles. I now feel like I'm starting to have a sense of the decade, a real accomplishment for one book written just after the end of that decade. The book was a commerical success in its day, and Allen followed it in 1940 with Since Yesterday, a similar cultural history of the 1930s. That one's going to be the kicker, as I know much more about that decade already. But Allen's style and insights are remarkably accessible and commonsensical here, and I hope they will continue to be in the next book.

2. The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts - 1994
Though not a completely consistently strong book, this collection of essays personal and cultural and sometimes both makes the number 2 spot because of how powerfully it moved me in its personal sections, and how eerily prophetic it is in its cultural ones. Birkerts, an academic and creative writer who has taught throughout the Northeast and for many years has been the editor of AGNI, composites this book as if it were a verbal collage, starting with a few essays about his youth and young adulthood (the parts which struck me most and have stayed with me), progressing to an unapologetically unsystematic investigation into the reading habits of Americans in the latter half of the 20th Century, and ending with essays decrying the spread of electronic communication (this, at the cusp of the Internet going public!) and what it will do to the way we relate to one another. While not entirely doom and gloom, this final section is remarkable in how it predicts not only the rise of an online counterculture which will become mainstream, but also the types of alienation that culture will have from previous generations, and the glut of information never before considered important which will not only be transmitted, but kept and treasured by almost everyone. Remember, this is before almost any public Internet presence existed.

As a librarian, it tickles me to no end that Birkerts is smart enough to realize that the media containers for such information will exponentially proliferate and die just as fast, leaving libraries, archives, and museums unable to keep up with how quickly their media, though not their information, becomes obsolete. Thus far Birkerts is brilliant, but then he becomes perhaps the first critic to say how horrible it will be that soon the print book will be dead and gone (hence, the title of the collection). Speaking professionally here, I seriously doubt that's going to be true anytime soon. Maybe one day, a century or so from now, but likely not in our lifetimes, and while in 1994 it's prescient in terms of its argument, I think he does skew just a bit into curmudgeon mode at this point. He wallows here for a bit, and the book ends. So, it's not perfect, but it's always intelligent and well-argued, often magnificent, and almost scary in how clearly it articulates the basic communication dynamics and attitudes upon which all the past decade's popular culture has been built, before that culture existed.

1 - Joe Gould's Secret - Joseph Mitchell - 1965
After the 2000 film adaptation still made the cut as one of my most personally affecting and important films ever, I held my breath and plunged into the original book, which exists somewhere between biography, novella, essay, and memoir. Mitchell, a writer for the New Yorker, wrote vivid sketches of various NYC denizens known and unknown in his day, including one in 1942 of Joe Gould, an eccentric bum and writer who claimed to be able to speak the language of seagulls and was working on a huge sociological treatise called An Oral History of the World, made up of autobiography, social commentary, and conversations with people from every walk of life Gould had encountered. Gould and Mitchell became friends, and in the book Mitchell chronicles more of Gould's life beyond what could be covered in the 1942 article, as well as how Gould's last years were spent and how he died. It's a masterwork of empathy, and a penetrating study in what it means to be a human being among other human beings, and what it means to be alone with oneself. As I read the book I realized how closely filmmaker Stanley Tucci had adhered to the original source material, especially in its spirit. I can't talk about it any better than I did in my earlier post, so you may as well go back and read that. I teared up twice while reading the book, once where you'd expect and once where Mitchell gives a multi-page side-ramble into his own life, his own questions about himself, his own joys and sorrows. For someone so reticent as Mitchell and so used to writing sketches of other people, those 4 or 5 pages might have been the hardest to write. At least it felt that way when I read them. And yet they're quite beautiful.

Top 10 TV Shows of 2010

2010-12-18T23:02:00.027-05:00

Considering I took a substantial break from TV this summer while working on my movies project, it's pretty decent that I was still able to watch 39 new-to-me seasons of TV this calendar year, only 2 less than last year's total. Of course many if not most of those seasons were 13 episodes or less in length, with the profusion of both American cable shows and British shows I watch. We'll jump right in, after a brief sidenote about 24, a show I've enjoyed for over eight years. Season 8, broadcast this past spring, was the end of the show, but in its final season it did something unique and rather fascinating. Devotees of the series like to debate the quality of seasons rather than specific episodes; one episode of 24 is much like another except in very rare instances. We could go into a ranking of each season and why, in detail, I would place this one above that one and so on, but that would get awfully boring for you, I'm sure. I will say I do agree with the conventional opinion which says seasons 4 and 5 are the peak of the series. But season 8 is a conundrum, because the first 11 episodes almost entirely suck, while the last 13 episodes are among the best - and most sustained in quality from one to the next - the series ever achieved. I can't in good conscience list season 8 on my Top 10 this year because that awful first half, but the series did have an amazing finish, really fun and really moving, which is something few shows can do after so many years on the air.

show & season - year originally broadcast - network - episodes & run time

10. Dollhouse, season 2 - 2009-10 - FOX - 13 eps., ~42 min. each
As I said in last year's Top 10, the second season of Dollhouse, to that point, was doing well for itself, and it continued to do well in its last few episodes which were broadcast in 2010. While good enough to land here, it's in the number 10 slot because of the tack Joss Whedon took in telling his story. Perhaps understandably, after having been burned in having all three of his previous TV shows cancelled before fully telling their stories (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and especially Firefly), he employed a tactic you don't usually see in network television. Having planned the general arc of all his characters for a full five seasons of Dollhouse, I'm pretty sure he crammed all of the major plot developments from seasons 2-5 into season 2. This isn't stated in any interview I've read with him, so I'm just guessing, but the seams do show, especially in the latter half of the season. After an opening episode used mainly to reacquaint viewers with the characters after a short time gap between season 1 and 2, the conspiracy surrounding Senator Perrin, which seems to have supposed to last all season, takes 4 episodes, followed by Echo's mastery of her various imprints and the return of Alpha in the season 3 arc, in the next 3 episodes. The hidden secrets of the Rossum Corporation, the exploration of the Attic, and the showdown with the puppetmaster in charge take up 4 episodes and would likely have been season 4. And here's the brainwave: season 1's final episode, taking place 10 years in the future, was to be a glimpse ahead to season 5; season 2's last episode brings the timeline to a few months after the last episode of season 1. Having only these two epsiodes - broadcast a season apart - to represent season 5 means only the cursory, most-important questions are answered. The upcoming foray into comics to continue the story will (and this has been confirmed) involve unused material from the 10-years-on plotlines. A special edition comic, sold in pre-ordered DVD sets of season 2, clearly marks the start of the comic series 10 years into the future, a few months before the events in the last season 1 broadcast episode. It's intricate and it's fascinating and it's unique television storytelling, but it also loses some real emotional impact by being so rushed and so convoluted.

9. Stephen Fry in America - 2008 - BBC One - 6 eps., ~60 min. each
Simply put, if you don't know Stephen Fry, you don't know contemporary British comedy, as he's one of the major practicioners and influencers over much of Britain's comedic small screen in the past 25 years. He's an unabashed wordsmith, intellectual, wit, and keen observer of humanity, with the rare quality, despite these skills, of being an all-around rather friendly person. Personally, the 23 episodes of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster he and best friend Hugh Laurie made from 1990-94 are among the funniest television I've ever seen. Stephen Fry in America is a six-episode romp, in a converted London cab, throughout every one of the 50 states. Fry is an excellent explorer of America, between his lifelong fascination with our country, his insightful commentary as a bemused outsider, and his truly British version of a devil-may-care attitude towards things like farming lobsters and meeting Mafia members and riding in a hot-air balloon, which could be loosely summarized as "Oh dear, I suppose I have to do these things for the camera and I guess I should because I'll likely not have the chance to do this again, but really, I expect a hot toddy and a nap after this." In short, he's wonderfully wonderful. And his niceness, so rare in a man of his demeanor and accomplishments, means his hundreds of conversations with everyday Americans from all walks of life, though brief, are often interesting and real in a way documentary television rarely is. The range of people he meets, occupations and lifestyles he peeks in on, and forms of travelogue he employs is fun and engaging; I watched the whole thing in half a week.

8. Human Target, season 1 - 2010 - FOX - 13 eps., ~42 min. each
Based loosely on a DC comics character, Christopher Chance, an ex-con with a mysterious past, is the ultimate bodyguard for hire, integrating himself into a client's life to the extent that he becomes the target for whomever the client suspects is trying to harm or kill them. Backing him up are his only friend, an ex-detective named Winston, and hired gun Guerrero (played by the enjoyably subtle Jackie Earle Haley). From the first episode the series establishes itself as a locked-room action-adventure, with almost every episode involving Chance, often with his client, needing to escape from a impregnable location of some kind, from a speeding train to a high-tech company's headquarters to an abandoned mine to a mountaintop monastery. The show does a great job of balancing a case-of-the-week structure with continually mining Chance's backstory and providing recurring allies and villains who aren't cardboard characters. The casting directors then complement the writing by bringing in superb actors for secondary roles: Emmanuelle Vaugier, Armand Assante, Autumn Reeser, Amy Acker, and the truly excellent Lennie James. Owing a fair debt to various shows like Mission: Impossible, The Pretender, and Leverage, Human Target carves out its own territory and succeeds admirably.

7. Primeval, season 2 - 2008 - ITV - 7 eps., ~45 min. each
I don't really know, but I imagine the pitch meeting for Primeval went something like this:

Creators: Okay, close your eyes, and imagine present-day England. Stacked flats, city waterways, power plants, motorways, suburbs, sewers, amusement parks, grand old houses, rolling hillsides.
ITV programme directors: All right.
Creators: Dinosaurs.
ITV programme directors: Brilliant.

Primeval is a very high-minded, scientifically-accurate, philosophical exploration into what would happen if the mystery of space-time relocated dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures from the ancient past to the present day. And by that, I mean it's a creature feature involving an irascible and witty team of hunky scientists and government agents combating gigantic venomous centipedes, mind-altering parasitic worms, a rampanging mastodon, and your standard variety of carnivorous dinosaurs on land, sea, and air. Oh, and adopting a cute little flying lizard they name Rex. There has to be a cute, computer-generated lizard pet named Rex. No one could ever accuse this show of being serious, though the creators of the show were the guys who made the Walking With... series, so the various creatures really are accurate in terms of appearance and habits. Temporal anamolies are opening at intervals in various places around England and not all is as it seems: are these events random or guided? Can everyone in the clandestine goverment organization created to investigate be trusted? And what of the lead scientist's wife, who disappeared without trace years ago and now might be alive and leaving strange clues for them to follow? I watched the first two series this year, one after the other, and it's the most fun and fluffy show I've run across in a while. I liked season 2 more than season 1 just because conspiracy mode is in full swing, along with a mysterious alteration in the timeline which erases one main character and adds another, but played by the same actor. It's so B-movie but it's so good.

6. Battlestar Galactica (2004), season 3 - 2006-07 - SciFi - 20 eps., ~42 min. each
Let's move on to some actually serious science fiction. Yes, I know, I'm behind on BSG. I'm deliberately spacing out my viewing of it because it's a great show and I want to experience it slowly. (Actually, I'm also taking that tack with the shows listed this year at #5 and #3.) Season 3 involves the occupation on New Caprica, the aftermath of the colony's liberation, pursuit of an artifact which may hold the key to where Earth is located, and the mystery of the remaining Cylon models. The Cylons themselves share as much screen time as the Remnant, and after all's said and done, the season feels like the shift between what the series was for two seasons and what it will become in the last. Expertly guided by its writers, the ensemble cast does an amazing job here as loyalties change, expectations twist, and most of the characters find themselves in challenging, unforeseen situations. It's hard to say much else without giving anything away, though I will say I disagree with those who tried to fit the occupation storyline into a commentary on our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, there are some similarities, and I'm sure they're intended, but overall, there's a much greater resemblance to the Vichy regime in France and the French colonies, and its relationship to the Nazis during World War II than to our current situation, especially in the politics of both the Cylon leaders and the separate resistance, pacifist, and collusion movements which spring up among the colonists. Regardless, another excellent season of multi-dimensionial characters inhabitating a totally believable world unlike and yet like our own and confronted with difficult moral, philosophical, and ethical decisions upon which things greater than themselves depend. One last season to watch sometime next year!

5. Foyle's War, season 2 - 2003 - ITV - 4 eps., ~100 min. each
And now we actually move to within World War II. Christopher Foyle is a detective chief superintendent in Hastings, on the southern coast of England, in 1941. Denied the chance to help his country overseas, he deals with crime and criminals on the home front. I actually feel like there's not much I can say to top my description of the show when it landed at the #2 spot on my Top 10 in 2008. Foyle as a character remains deeply complex and deeply ethical as the world around him has descended further into chaos. Under constant bombing raids by the Germans and with strict rationing in effect on almost all goods, with no clear sign the U.S. will end its neutrality, it's beginning to look like the Allies may lose the war, and soon. Darker in content than season 1, this season also focuses a bit more on the wartime world than on character development, though the characters are by no means diminished in the storytelling. The world is indeed fascinating, and as much as possible is depicted with complete accuracy, but the characters are the heart of the series, hence the drop this year from #2 to #5. Still, fifth place is nothing to sneeze at. And anyways, this show is lodged pretty firmly in my heart as outstanding television.

4. Leverage, season 2 - 2009-10 - TNT - 15 eps., ~42 min. each
From the starting gun the second season of Leverage had the ground firmly under its feet, took off running, and never looked back. In terms of the dynamics between the characters, this show was my favorite of the season behind the one show we all know is in my #1 slot yet again. Repartee, interplay, the wit springboarding off one another right and left, Nate Ford and his cadre of thieves who steal for the little guy and take down the rich and powerful are rapidly becoming one of my favorite TV teams of all time. Reunited in Boston by a now-sober Nate, the group helps new clients, uncovers new enemies, and grows more attached to each other than they'd ever want to admit. But internal tensions aren't far either, an area which wasn't often present in season 1, but the writing and actors rise to the occasion. A new team member, played by Jeri Ryan, adds some nice color to the mix, and final two-parter sees the team truly in over its head.

3. Hustle, season 3 - 2006 - BBC One - 6 eps., ~60 min. each
Leverage owes quite a lot to Hustle, which is still a better show, in my opinion, but that might be just because it's British. As I've said before, the thieves in Hustle steal because they're thieves, not because they're Robin Hoods. Season 3 raises the bar yet again as the writers mix up the game more than in seasons 1 & 2, with the crew needing to find new digs, dealing with personal threats, blackmail from the police, recruitment by a legendary grifter, a mark who develops amnesia, and at one point even a "day off" with nothing to do and bordeom setting in, which of course leads to an afternoon of one-upsmanship and hijinks. Season 3 also explores more of the fantasy sequences which were used infrequently in previous seasons, including a Chaplin-esque silent movie pastiche and a Bollywood song and dance. It's a thrilling roller coaster of a show, and I think season 3 is my new favorite season.

2. Yes, Minister - 1980-84 - BBC Two - 21 eps., ~30 min. each
I've always suspected that I love Aaron Sorkin more than I should, but after watching Yes, Minister, I'm certain of it. In so many ways an obvious prototype for The West Wing, this show actually had three seasons over four years, with seven episodes each. However, there is almost no actual change in any of the elements of the show (writers, cast, directors, sets, music) between the seasons, and when it was released on DVD the BBC packaged everything together as one set, so I feel comfortable treating the show as one big chunk even though it was not initially written and broadcast as such. Like Primeval, it was another show I had every intention of watching only one season of, and then barreled through more because of how amazingly good it was. After a general election deposing the ruling party from power (the new ruling party and the opposition are never stated), the Rt. Hon. Jim Hacker begins the job he's always wanted, contributing to the government of the country as a cabinet minister. Idealistic and also slightly dim, he's quickly taken in hand by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, a career civil servant of the Home Office, who watches MPs come and go ...and helps them along in the coming and going as much as he can. Appleby is shrewd, selfish, and arrogant. And one of the wittiest, funniest characters ever on British television, played to perfection by Nigel Hawthorne. Along for the ride is Hacker's Principal Private Undersecretary, Bernard Woolley, who often ends up in the middle of the various machinations Hacker and Appleby throw at each other in trying to influence public policy.

Always satirical, the show is profoundly informed and informative concerning national goverment in a wildly interconnected international economy and political sphere. I was surprised and educated well in how little politics has changed in the abstract since the early '80s, regardless of the setting being in Britain and during the Cold War and before the advent of things like the Internet and the European Union. This is the key to Yes, Minister's continuing relevance (and to an extent what will likely be The West Wing's key as well). Sorkin's brilliance in forming the standard-setting American governmental TV series was to take government employees and treat them as an extended family who were all trying to do the right thing as they saw it, which is how the American Experiement has always wished to see its leaders portrayed. The British character, while not what I call pessimistic, has always had more room for dialogue laden with irony and situations covered in satire and farce. These characteristics are Yes, Minister's stock-in-trade, and they're delicious. Every episode ends with one character or another saying the phrase "Yes, Minister" in triumph, defeat, deference, resignation, or any other emotion appropriate to the compromises and pettiness of political life. I'll always love The West Wing, but this show now shares that small space in my heart. Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, the creators, moved on to make a sequel series, Yes, Prime Minister, in the latter 80s, which sees the cast move into 10 Downing Street, and that's going to be a joy to watch at some point too.

1. Mad Men, season 4 - 2010 - AMC - 13 eps., ~48 min. each
Here we are again. Was there really any doubt? Just like the last two years, which saw seasons 2 and 3 of Mad Men top my annual list, season 4 deserves the place of honor no less than they. But to be fair, season 4 was not quite as good as season 3; I'd actually put it on par with season 2, which I'd put above season 1. Still, "on par with season 2" means it's better than almost every season of every show ever, so I'm fine with the fact that so far, season 3 has been the best. After some huge changes in Don Draper's life, we are once again along for the ride as both he and those around him try to figure out "Who is Don Draper?" which is actually the first line uttered in the season, by a reporter trying to do a story on him. The rest of the gang are here too, fighting their own individual and collective battles, in various but always complicated and gray stages of alliances and enmities. Another show I can't really say anything about without giving away secrets, an interesting thing about season 4 is that the peak episode was in the middle of the season rather than at the end, though the last few episodes do build to a surprising climax which opens up all sorts of questions for season 5, as a good finale should. Mad Men still remains a show important to me in many ways aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional, one of the few shows I've run across to really do so in a sustained way. (There's literally only a handful of these.) And though it may be a drag after three years, it's true: I still think Mad Men is the best show currently on the air.

Top 10 Albums of 2010, Second Half

2010-12-14T17:42:00.000-05:00

It's that special time again, a season to take stock of what has come before, in the past six or twelve months, and celebrate the good things. Oh, and Christmas too, I suppose. But this December I'm feeling more succinct, for a few different reasons. The blog has, this calendar year, not been as exciting a thing for me as in years past - the scarcity of posts in 2010 makes that obvious. I feel like my life changed in a few significant ways this year, mostly related to my new job, my living situation (problems I haven't had to deal with before from neighbors), and a shift in the way I relate to the Christian student ministry here at Bluebell. By and large the first has been excellent, the second unfortunate, and the third a definite mixed bag. I wouldn't say I'm any less talkative than I was in 2009, but I do see that I'm talkative in different ways, and the blog hasn't been a dominant one. Of my posts so far this year, only about 30% of them I'd categorize as really talking about my life; the rest were mostly about hobbies or were reviews of music or movies. And it's not like those things aren't important to me, but they're not really life of the daily, lived-in sense. So while I'm excited to share my usual favorite music, books, and TV shows of the year, I'll be trimming my commentary on them. I hope you don't mind. Additionally, Grooveshark is being wonky and not letting me have my way with it the way I want, so I'm forgoing a streaming playlist this time. If you are curious about the albums, I'm sure you can find lots of ways of finding streaming snippets or full tracks. And don't worry, no, I'm really not that insensitive to Christmas, but it's where the joke was, so I went with it.

artist - album - year of release

5. Owl City - Ocean Eyes - 2009. Oddly enough, all five albums once again are from this or last year. Ocean Eyes was a gift from TBO, the acronym standing for "Tall, Bald, and Obvious." People buying music for me has always been a hit-or-miss proposition; this attempt was mostly a hit. Owl City is the pseudonym of Adam Young, a mid-twenties guy who started making synth-pop and electronica in his parents' basement. As that all-too-brief biography may suggest, the music is precise and almost lovingly cared for, and feels like he spent many nights sequestered away perfecting it. Likewise, many of the lyrics unfortunately feel like they were written by someone who hasn't spent the past few years outside his basement much. It's odd - fascinating, really, and it accounts for some of my interest in the album - to have such a strong musical presence with some really weak lyrics. Not all of the songs are; the words to hit single "Fireflies" are admirably subtle and capture a real sense of awe and wonder at the world, and "Tidal Wave" closes the album with a strong statement of facing life with eyes open. But most of the other tracks deal in cliche at their worst, and at their best, show simple inexperience of life and love. Yet here, too, there are exceptions which work anyway: "Hello Seattle" is a cute little paean to that drizzly city, and "Dental Care" is a quirky tribute to everyone's fear of their dentist, and wouldn't be out of place in Jonathan Colton or Paul and Storm's repertoires. However, it's hard to take seriously a song, without any irony, rhyming "summer" with "bummer," or a song titled "Vanilla Twilight." Still, the songs that completely work work really well, and the music throughout is top-notch in its genre.

4. Crooked Still - Some Strange Country - 2010. As I mentioned in the first half of this year's full top 10, I saw Sarah Jarosz in concert this spring, opening for Crooked Still. The latter's set, heavy on tracks from their upcoming album, got me interested, and I picked up Some Strange Country when it was released this summer. Billing themselves as "alternative bluegrass," Crooked Still walks a fine line between the traditional modern mode exemplified by, say, Alison Krauss & Union Station, and the newgrass style pioneered by Nickel Creek, among others, which includes Sarah Jarosz as a poster child for the second generation of newgrass. It's a line they tend to walk very well indeed on Some Strange Country, though the album is not without missteps.

The immediate draw for me, which is still my favorite aspect of the band, was the voice of Aoife O'Donovan, an intriguing combination of wispy longing with a healthy dash of rock n' roll. (Indeed, the one contemporary-ish cover song is the album closer, the Rolling Stones' "You Got the Silver," which O'Donovan belts in a surprising powerhouse style which works.) 2/3rds of the album is covers, mostly traditional songs cast in new arrangements, with the other third original compositions by the band. Another strength is that the five-piece plays so well together they sound like more musicians than five. The production, too, allows for a lush, full sound which isn't always achievable by an all-acoustic band, but again Crooked Still continues to surprise. However, a real drawback to the album is another aspect of the production, which some people would love but I personally have little affection for when used in Americana music forms: each instrument has been tracked and mixed individually, with the final result then compressed to "level-out" the mix. A simple test for this kind of production is if, when you listen to a song, you can isolate every instrument's performance and rarely if ever is there any focus on one or another of them throughout the song, apart from the beginning or end. (Almost all pop songs are recorded this way.) While often appropriate in radio-friendly genres, this adds a flatness that, to me, feels out of place on acoustic instruments. Plus with ensembles as talented as Crooked Still, what I want is to hear them together in a room playing off of each other, giving a recording more of a live rather than a studio feel.

The songs themselves are often inspired choices: opener "Sometimes in this Country" sets a wonderfully dark atmospheric tone shot through with moments of hope, which characterizes the vibe of the entire record. "The Golden Vanity" is a superb retelling of that engimatic old sea song, and the rollicking, off-kilter Dock Boggs tune "Calvary" is another high note. It's hard not to bust out with the sing-a-long chorus of Doc Watson's "I'm Troubled." The slower numbers are often quite good as well, especially the tender dying ballad "Distress." However, "Cold Mountains" plods along aimlessly, while "Henry Lee" works itself into a banjo-driven sound and fury signifying not much of anything. The original songs fare better, all solid and interesting, with the two by O'Donovan outstanding. The first few times I listened to the penultimate track "You Were There" I got shivers down my spine. I'm excited to see where Crooked Still goes next in their rather unique musical journey. I just want different production on their next record.

3. Phil Collins - Going Back - 2010. Production is also a big deal in Phil's newest release, his first proper album since 2002, after eight years involving two compilations and two soundtracks. Growing up, long before he joined Genesis, he learned to drum and loved Motown music, and Going Back - which was originally to be titled 18 Good Reasons - is a collection of 18 Motown covers from his youth. (There's also a deluxe version of the album, which of course I have, containing 29 songs in total.) But he decided very early on that the production of the album was going to be as close to that of the original songs as he could get using 1960s instruments and 21st Century technology. To add another original spark he asked the three remaining members of The Funk Brothers, an outfit who played as a studio band on many Motown classics, to do the same for his album. So in terms of production there's the occasional hiss, noise on the quieter tracks, distortion when the vocals get too loud, and a generally muddy overall mix in which some of the instrumentation gets a bit lost. It doesn't sound "bad" by any means, it sounds like an album out of the '60s. Collins does have the right idea about the smoothness of the production, however: even with the mud, there's none of the tin-can aesthetic sometimes found in Motown and blues records from mid-century. The arrangements, again adhering as closely as possible to the originals, are lush and full, with crisp piano and gorgeous horns on many tracks. An almost perfect string section propels "Papa Was a Rolling Stone."

The songs themselves range from staples of the genre ("Heatwave," "Standing in the Shadows of Love," "Uptight (Everything's Alright)") to little-known album tracks or b-sides of singles like "In My Lonely Room," "Something About You" and "Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever." Only three songs are ballads; Phil specifically wanted to do very few in that style. Most songs are mid-tempo doo-wops on love and loss, as you'd expect. The expertise of the many musicians involved shines through on every track, and even though there are a couple which don't hold up as well with multiple listens ("Jimmy Mack," "Love is Here and Now You're Gone") by and large the album is successful at what it intends: a time-capsule celebration of classic Motown music which is still relevant and fun.

2. The Weepies - Be My Thrill - 2010. Back in 2008 Tin Man introduced me to The Weepies second full-length, Say I Am You, which topped that year's album list; last year I got their follow-up, Hideaway, which landed at #3. This year, I'm chronologically at pace with the husband and wife team of Steve Tannen and Deb Talan with their current release, Be My Thrill, which I like more than Hideaway but still not as much as Say I Am You. Fittingly, therefore, it ends up in second place on this list. The Weepies write thoughtful, introspective, often tender and sometimes exuberant songs, and the new album is no expection. Usually splitting vocal duties relatively evenly, this time around Deb takes almost all of the lead vocals, though interestingly the weaker tracks tend to be sung by Steve. First single "I Was Made for Sunny Days" is a wonderful song, upbeat and romantic without being cheesy in the slightest, melodically creative and catchy. The real pop song of the record, though, is the title track, which initially came into existence as a song about the frustrations of married life but became transformed into a playful, joyful catalogue of its self-imposed limits. Marriage and children are the overall themes of the record; after Hideaway's dark night of the soul when the couple were having troubles conceiving, and then having two children in as many years, Be My Thrill is a happier, more contented album, though of course not without its concerns. "Add My Effort" is a sweet if grammatically confusing song; "Please Speak Well of Me" worries about how its narrator will be remembered, very much a curveball considering it's the opening track of the album. There's a degree of sonic experimentation on the record, with mixed results: "How Do You Get High?" is a disaster, though thankfully the only one, while the last two tracks, "Hope Tomorrow" and "Empty Your Hands," are among the best songs they've ever written together. Overall their music is just so satisfying, and I'm looking forward to many more Weepies records for years to come.

1. Steve Hackett - Out of the Tunnel's Mouth - 2009. The pride of place for this half of the year, however, goes to Mr. Hackett, whom you will no doubt remember from his seven-year stint as the guitarist of Genesis during the 1970s. Since making his first solo record in 1975, he hasn't stopped, and has 21 studio albums to his credit as well as another dozen live albums. (Confession: I only have 10 total.) Always someone who focuses on music over lyrics, with many of his songs being instrumentals, most of his releases in the past half-dozen years have been geared towards classical guitar and acoustic music. Out of the Tunnel's Mouth is, in its way, both a return to his progressive rock roots and shift towards something more, along with paying greater attention to lyrics and vocal composition in his songs. A few of the tracks on this release are intensely personal, related to the breakup of his 32-year-marriage and the subsequent reboot of his life. The two songs which anchor the album are "Emerald and Ash," about his divorce, and "Sleepers," a grand suite, easily the best track on the album, with heavily intricate instrumentation and suitably sweeping lyrics exploring the worlds of our dreams. There's an admirable attempt at encapsulating what Steve's music has generally involved so far (the excellent "Nomads" is as good an introduction to his songwriting and playing style as you'll find in 4 minutes), and there's a taste of the guitar-god direction in "Tubehead," an instrumental heavy on electric guitar acrobatics in a sly reference to Buckethead's song "Jordan." But in the last three tracks, Steve settles into an indication of what his music might well be like going forward: studies in contrasts rooted strongly in a sense of place and incorporating local musical tradition. The instrumental "Ghost in the Glass" serves contemplative acoustic guitar for its first minute, with shimmering, wandering electric guitar for its latter two minutes, while "Still Waters" captures the swamp rock vibe of southern Louisiana and "Last Train to Istanbul" incorporates Turkish musical motifs and shifting time signatures, both songs with relevant lyrics to match. Steve himself refers to this album as "a series of ambushes" and that's a prescient description, especially musically, of what Out of the Tunnel's Mouth offers: a ravishing, giddy, sometimes frightening train ride through the coal-dark night, opening onto a pale morning of lingering sadness, yet with the committed pursuit of new directions.

Old New Favorites

2010-10-31T20:54:00.016-04:00

So I already listed some of the films I was surprised to find off my best-of lists this summer; here's a baker's dozen of films which not only stayed on, but endeared themselves even more to me and moved up in the rankings. (Note: these don't include films in my top lists which I knew would still be my favorites and fulfilled that expectation, e.g. Children of Men, Network, The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential, The Age of Innocence, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, a half-dozen John Sayles films, etc.)

title - year released - director - stars

The Little Foxes - 1941 - William Wyler - Bette Davis, Teresa Wright, Herbert Marshall, Richard Carlson, Charles Dingle, Carl Benton Reid.
The secret weapon in The Little Foxes is not Lillian Hellman's whip-smart dialogue, which she closely adapted from her original play, but the brilliance in Bette Davis's performance of it. Davis was encouraged to go see the play performed before shooting started, and ended up deciding to play the character completely differently than Tallulah Bankhead had on stage, as a forceful, demanding woman instead of as a victim of her brothers' avarice. The family drama centers on Davis as Regina, a cold and bitter woman trying to hold together, by any means necessary, her desire to be wealthy and in control of her family. Hellman's plays are usually highly structured and moralistic; Wyler's directing made that structure seem oppressive (including the famous static shot of Regina, in focus in the foreground, sitting still while her husband, in the middle of a stroke, desperately tries to cross the room behind her and mount the stairs to get to his heart medicine) and Davis's larger-than-life acting made the moralism feel restrained. While Regina still ends up in the same place she does at the end of Hellman's play, Davis's performance of Regina is more like the glowering of an alligator in a sewer, down but not out, than the emotional destruction of the character which Hellman intended and Bankhead performed.

The Big Sleep - 1946 - Howard Hawks - Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Charles Waldron.
Bogie and Bacall and Hawks and screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner) had, in 1944's To Have and Have Not, created one of the most perfect films ever made, in my opinion. When I first saw The Big Sleep, a few months after seeing To Have and Have Not, which had the same contributors plus Leigh Brackett as a co-writer, I thought it was pretty good, and worth a "best-of" listing, but this time around it really impressed me in ways I wasn't expecting. Exceptional liberties are taken with Raymond Chandler's original novel, and for the better. Hawks' and Bogie's Marlowe is in many ways the ultimate movie hero: unflappable and passionate, moral and pragmatic, intelligent and playful. What I realized this time around is that the film is built around Bogie and Bacall, not around the labryinthine multiple murder mystery which Marlowe is ostensibly called in to solve. (Actually, he's called in to investigate a blackmailer, who then ends up dead.) The chemistry, almost always wry, detached, and mocking, between Bogart and Bacall is simply electric, and everything else fades into the background as simply obstacles to their cat-and-mouse flirting (or rather, to be honest, cat-and-cat). At one point during the filming, Bogart asked which character killed another one, and Hawks didn't know. He asked the writers, who weren't sure. Then they asked Chandler who, because of how they'd already sliced up his story, had no idea. Now, I thought it was pretty clear who had done it, but I wanted to be sure, so I looked up the movie on Wikipedia. Where I had expected your standard intricate exploration of the plot from a random cinema diehard, I got four paragraphs of mostly mush which left out entire sections of the movie. So I declared myself the random fanatic and rewrote the thing. Now what's on Wikipedia is complete, and 10 paragraphs long. But don't go read it. Go watch the film instead.

East of Eden - 1955 - Elia Kazan - James Dean, Julie Harris, Raymond Massey, Richard Davalos, Jo Van Fleet.
James Dean only made three films as a credited star before he died in a car accident: East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. His performances in all three are arguably masterful, though it also must be said there was not a wide range of emotional difference between the three characters he played. He seemed to explode onto the Hollywood scene and America's cultural consciousness, despite that he had bit parts in four earlier films, played on- and off-Broadway, and had over 20 television appearances on various shows in the early 1950s. Still, his iconic status is earned, most especially in East of Eden as the moody Cal Trask, jealous of his brother and desperate to win his father's approval, in many ways in danger of becoming a lost soul. John Steinbeck, who wrote the original novel and adapted it for the screenplay, often wrote about those on the physical and emotional margins of society, and Cal's journey is a heartbreaking one to see on the big screen, especially with Dean's expressive, haunted eyes staring out at you. I had forgotten how solid the story was, and how solid the actors across the board perform their roles. Kazan as a director can be kitschy - for example, the cinematography involved where Dean is on a children's swing and the camera moves with swing, is obvious and overblown - but by and large Kazan does a good job of letting his actors arrest his camera and tell the story by their bodies and words.

MASH - 1970 - Robert Altman - Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Roger Bowen, Rene Auberjonois, Gary Burghoff.
Several friends of mine live and die for the 11-season TV show from the 1970s & early '80s, and I love these friends dearly, but we'll have to agree to disagree about which version of MASH is the best. I'm biased towards Altman's film largely because it's an ideal venue for his loose methods of writing, blocking, and directing. The misadventures of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital ostensibly in the Korean War provide a very episodic, practically TV-like, series of vignettes satirizing the Vietnam War, the Army, the American government, and American institutions and stereotypes. By now it's a well-heeled trope: soldiers behaving like crazies in order to stay sane in a truly mad war, but MASH did it as a movie in the modern era first and perhaps best. Ostensibly based on a novel, much of the film is ad-libbed, though the basic arcs of the scenes themselves are present in the script. Altman achieves a level of brilliance for juxtaposing the bulk of the film with the surgeons continually joking and pranking with several short sequences of them in the operating theatre, losing none of their personality but performing their medical duties in poor circumstances with skill and competence. These scenes, not explictly gory but involving many implications of life-or-death situations, also double as a reinforcing the continual presence and madness of the war. What really won me over this time, however, was simply how funny the characters and dialogue are. Even with a large cast of mostly unknown actors, there's a striking evenness to the performances and a refreshing irreverance towards the conventions of cinema which the New Hollywood directors, Altman especially, made a staple of sharp, socially conscious moviemaking.

The Conversation - 1974 - Francis Ford Coppola - Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Cindy Williams, Michael Higgins. / Enemy of the State - 1998 - Tony Scott - Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Regina King.
While the story and much of the screenplay was conceived in the 1960s, Coppola had the funding to make The Conversation in a brief period between the first two Godfather films. The story of a professional sound technician who works in surveillance, Harry Caul (Hackman) has a policy or not involving himself in what he overhears, until he begins to suspect his current employer may be gathering information about a young couple in order to murder them. More than anything else the film is an insightful character study of Harry, his paranoias, what he chooses to do with his information, and what consequences his choices have for himself and those around him. It had always been high up in my favorite films, and watching it again made me remember how much I'd been taken with the story and the character, an odd man who is both a child and an adult, and familiar to me as someone whom, with a different environment and different choices made, I could have turned into at some point. But the truly surprising thing, when I rewatched Enemy of the State, a fun thriller I had initially seen a year before watching The Conversation, was that I realized Brill, Hackman's character in Enemy, is for all intents and purposes an older version of Harry Caul. In fact, watching the two again so close together, I picked up on a handful of hints in the later film that Brill might actually be Harry. It's never made explicit, and the snippets of Brill's past we get contradict Harry's...unless he had adopted a new identity in The Conversation, which, given the traumatic past Harry had, is possible. It's a fascinating idea, and Enemy was a better film for it, not that watching Will Smith wig out over being hunted by government agents isn't enjoyable.

Picnic at Hanging Rock - 1975 - Peter Weir - Anne Lambert, Karen Robson, Rachel Roberts, Anthony Llewellyn-Jones.
In my previous list of films which dropped off my best-of list, I mentioned that once upon a time I really enjoyed watching very slow-moving films. This was one of those which stayed on the list and reminded me how captivating it can be to watch the filmic equivalent of a tide coming in suddenly, crashing upon and washing away a sandcastle, and then hours later watching the outgoing tide slowly receding and uncovering the misshapen sand left as a result. Picnic at Hanging Rock operates in much the same way: on a field trip to Hanging Rock with their schoolmates at the end of the 19th Century, a trio of Australian girls and one of their teachers mysteriously vanish without a trace. The loss, sudden and complete, unravels the other girls and teachers, and obsesses two boys who happened to be out at the rock formation the same day. The tale, basically a Gothic mystery set in the Outback, is remarkable because of Peter Weir's insistence on the physical details, the textures, and symbolisms involved. If the appeal of MASH for me is driven primarily by performance and direction subservient to performance, the appeal of Picnic is that the actors are, by and large, unimportant to the story, which is more about what the camera sees and doesn't see, what little conversation exists between people and what highly emotional things, some beautiful, some monstrous, go unsaid, and a mystery that dwarfs them all. Despite the pacing, the movie went by more swiftly than I'd remembered, and even knowing how things would end, I was swept along by the tide.

Caddyshack - 1980 - Harold Ramis - Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray, Cindy Morgan, Ted Knight, Michael O'Keefe.
From the ethereal to the crass: Caddyshack is probably my favorite sports comedy film. Back in the days where Chevy Chase and Bill Murray were funny as a by-product of being alive, it was a perfect vehicle for them (and for Rodney Dangerfield), as all three were most comfortable improvising their lines; perhaps not unexpectedly, the story itself is a complete mess with basically one character (O'Keefe's Danny Noonan) relied on for any kind of plot and the stars simply clowning along the sidelines of it, though the sidelines make up the majority of the movie. It was Ramis' first time directing, so although there wasn't much he could do to rein in the production, it luckily worked out for them, not particularly on the film's initial release, but as an underground cult hit since the mid-'80s. The combination of exquisitely timed slapstick and eminently quotable dialogue in most of the scenes - not to mention the complete camp of the animatronic gopher - make it one of the few comedies I found myself laughing at just as much the second time around.

Field of Dreams - 1989 - Phil Alden Robinson - Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, Burt Lancaster.
If Caddyshack is my favorite sports comedy film, Field of Dreams would probably be my favorite sports drama film. Not that the movie, as a drama, is realistic in the slightest. My working theory about the game of baseball and its importance in American culture (especially after finally watching all of Ken Burns' classic documentary earlier this year) is that it's inherently balanced on a seesaw between extravagant hope and crushing tragedy, where hitting a ball 4 times out of every 10 is nothing short of miraculous. It's the only American game where the defending team has the ball, and the only one which doesn't involve a clock - it's possible for a baseball game to become eternal. And as Burns notes, even the shape of the plate is all about "coming home." So Field of Dreams, in my view, gets much of the philosophical implications concerning baseball correct, in its story of a man (Costner) who owns a farm in Iowa and one day hears a voice, from nowhere, telling him that if he builds a baseball diamond in his field, 'Shoeless Joe' Jackson will be able to play baseball there. Joe Jackson was of course one of the eight players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, and acquitted by a jury, and still banned from ever playing baseball again. And so it happens, just like the voice said it would, except the voice isn't finished yet. Truly wonderful performances by Amy Madigan as Costner's wife and James Earl Jones as a reclusive novelist (based on J.D. Salinger), with capable backup by Ria Liotta as Joe and Burt Lancaster in his last film, make the fantasy complete. I'd forgotten how good, in a few different senses of that term, this film is.

The Secret of Roan Inish - 1994 - John Sayles - Jeni Courtney, Richard Sheridan, Mick Lally, Eileen Colgan.
One of my other projects this summer was to watch/rewatch all of John Sayles' films, as I hadn't yet seen all of them but had tended to like what I'd seen, to the point that 6 of them had been on my best-of lists. (Watching the ones I hadn't seen netted me a 7th.) But of those 6, this film had been the lowest, more a children's story than anything else, and less concerned with Sayles' usual themes of identity and community than I'd thought. I'd thought wrong; Sayles was even subtler than I'd credited him to be. Earlier this year I read "Islands of the Mind" by John Gillis, and among the various things the book included was some history of the Orkney Islands, off the Scottish coast, and the relocation of many of the settlers there in the mid-20th Century onto the mainland. While Roan Inish is set in Ireland, it's the exact same situation of relocation and displacement which forms the background for the story, largely unexplored in the film because of Sayles' insistence that the viewer sees the story through the eyes of Fiona, a girl sent to live with her grandparents after her mother's death. Fiona and her cousin Eamon become entranced by stories of Roan Inish, the island her family used to live on before moving to the mainland, and the disappearance of her younger brother Jamie, who was taken by the sea when the family left the islands. The two children secretly explore the old island, and Fiona starts seeing clues that Jamie may still be alive. If this sounds similar to Picnic at Hanging Rock with vanishing children and secret explorations, banish the thought: Roan Inish is a purely tender movie, sweet and quiet, and seen through the wondering eyes of a child. Even though I'd already seen the movie and enjoyed it, Sayles surprised me yet again, as he tends to, with a feather-light touch on an offbeat but real situation sparking questions of what family and community mean in the real world.

Three Colors: Red - 1994 - Krzysztof Kieslowski - Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Frederique Feder.
Good friends in grad school had encouraged me to see the entire trilogy of these films, which Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski (no, I don't know how to pronounce his name), known for a heavy use of structure in his films, decided would correspond to the symbolism of each color in the French flag: blue for liberty, white for equality, and red for fraternity, though each movie's story is completely independent of the others'. Blue I actively disliked, White didn't make much of an impression on me, but I was fascinated by Red, the story of a fashion model, feeling alienated from her controlling boyfriend, who accidentally crosses paths with a retired judge, whom she is shocked to learn spies on his neighbors. The "fraternity" motif has to do with how much we as human beings can, and should, know one another, as the model, despite her disgust, is intrigued by what the judge is doing and the uncomfortable questions, ethical and emotional, it raises for her. It's a film of almost palpable delicacy and suffused with an almost hypnotic sense of both opportunity and tragedy. As the movie progresses the various symbolisms involved, not least of which is the increasing use of various reds as the primary color palette, begin to form shared languages between the characters and between the viewer and the film itself, hinting by the end that true knowledge, both between people and beyond humanity, is not so limited in form and function as we might assume. I'd forgotten how lyrical and thought-provoking it is, and that's why it surprised and impressed me all over again.

The Negotiator - 1998 - F. Gary Gray - Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, J.T. Walsh, Paul Giamatti, Siobhan Fallon, Regina Taylor, Ron Rifkin, John Spencer, David Morse.
Another action-mystery I'd forgotten about, The Negotiator is a spinning whirl of a story, which starts slowly as a crack hostage negotiator (Jackson) is framed for the murder of a cop, his old partner. But to get to the truth he takes hostage the office and workers of a man he thinks knows the identity of the real killer, calling in a negotiator he's never met before (Spacey) as he's trying to convince everyone that's he's been framed. Written as such, the concept seems a little dopey, but the way it plays out on screen is riveting, driven by both Gray's jumpy, kinetic direction and Jackson and Spacey's intelligent performances. The supporting cast as well is excellent and the script is fine enough that they all get to perform actual characters instead of characterizations. In many ways it's a film centered on the mechanics of communicating in a hostage situation, but externalized and compunded through the twists of a negotiator becoming a kidnapper. Very well done and, having forgotten who the killer actually was, I once again guessed incorrectly. Gotta respect a film which can do that to me.

Joe Gould's Secret - 2000 - Stanley Tucci - Ian Holm, Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Susan Sarandon, Steve Martin.
Among the long list of films I rewatched were a small handful which had affected me profoundly when I'd seen them the first time, I was half-scared as to whether or not they'd do so on a second viewing. It can be hard to let a film go which had been so important once but now doesn't live up to what you had built it up to be in that initial rush of affection and meaning. As I wrote about with my earlier list, Days of Heaven didn't make that cut. Donnie Darko lost ground but not enough to drop off my best-of lists. Children of Men maintained its high position. And the one I was most anxious about, Joe Gould's Secret, surpassed my expectations and it was with a lump in my throat and a deep emotional satisfaction, mixed with wistfulness, that I watched the credits roll a second time.

The film is an abbreviated version of a true story between two men in the 1940s: Joseph Mitchell (Tucci), a columnist for The New Yorker who writes character studies of the offbeat denizens of the city; and Joseph Gould, a bohemian and homeless bum with a past that includes graduating from Harvard, researching the Chippewa Indians in the Dakotas, and being a reporter for the New York Evening Mail. Gould is a captivating figure, larger than life, by turns meek and kind, drunk and rude, continuously soliciting meals and money (for "the Joe Gould Fund") from a rotating set of friends and acquaintances. At night he retires to various bars and restaurants and works on writing his book, "An Oral History of Our Time," comprised of the passing comments he's heard from people in the city from every walk of life during the day, as well as autobiographical sections about his life. When Gould and Mitchell meet, Gould has been writing the Oral History for decades. Though unedited, uncollected, and handwritten in many notebooks stashed throughout New York with various friends, Gould's book stands at over 9 million words. The film chronicles their story together, as Mitchell composes a piece for The New Yorker about Gould and becomes one of his close friends, and works with him to try to get at least some of the Oral History published. It is, in my opinion, one of the finest character studies ever made. That comment applies to the book, as well, of the same title as the film, which Mitchell published in 1965 after Gould's death; the film draws entirely from that text plus the original 1942 profile Mitchell wrote for The New Yorker entitled "Professor Seagull." (One of Gould's favorite things to do at parties in the Village was to call everyone's attention to him by either enacting Chippewa dances or to talking loudly in "the language of the seagulls," which he claimed to be able to speak and translate.)

What idenitifies who a man is? That is the central question Joe Gould's Secret (book and film) explores. Personality, associations, education, geography, career, intellect, social convention: what signifies a man to the world? What signifies him to himself? Who is he within his own mind? And why does that matter? And is a man matter? (if I may repeat a pun Mitchell himself implies). By the end of the story, in both media, these questions have taken on quiet meaning and persistence for Mitchell, as Gould lives his mesmerizing life, slowly fading away in the manner of all homeless bums and all men. Tucci doesn't definitively answer these questions in the film, but leaves hints, images, moments which might illuminte, however briefly, a direction the answers lay. It is a film about the realities of hard life and soft forgiveness. It marks the unknowingness of our living and dying, and admits of how knowledge and pain are intertwined.

One thing the film is not, is precious. There are no cliches here about happiness or love, though love is a real presence in the film. Ian Holm gives a fiery, volatile performance as Joe Gould, the necessary counterpoint to Tucci's shy and gentlemanly Mitchell, both of them shrewd observers of humanity and wide-eyed to the real lives of the poor and outcast of the city. The supporting cast, save Steve Martin's amalgamized publisher Charles Duell, all play real people who had real interactions with Gould and Mitchell: portrait painter Alice Neel; art gallery owner Vivian Marquie; Village Vanguard founder Max Gordon; Therese Mitchell, Joseph Mitchell's wife, a mostly unknown photographer of street scenes. Certainly the film can't really cover the full extent of these two men's lives, or the intricacies of the several years they spent as friends. Certainly no film or book can delve to the heart of a man's identity or explain the varied triumphs and tragedies of the human condition. But Joe Gould's Secret is a step towards the recognition of something true about us, something in the exhalation of a sigh at the end of the day and the perk of an eyebrow at a face met suddenly around a corner. The daily rituals which become a lifetime of repeated gestures, the ink pushed into paper with determination to keep a moment remembered, keep it in existence. This book and this film are treasures to me, and remain so.

Three Hours' Work

2010-10-22T18:10:00.001-04:00

One of the things I love about my new job is how flexibility is an expectation. A few weekends ago I worked the Sunday afternoon & evening Reference shifts, a responsibility the librarians take in turns since no one wants to always work on Sundays. Having done it that weekend, it was expected that I'd take Monday or Tuesday off, to balance out my work week at 5 days, even though we're all salaried and technically could be mandated to work a 6-day week when we need to supply Reference coverage. So I gladly took Monday as a day for myself.

At the time I was hip-deep into an edited collection of Alice Cary's "Clovernook Sketches." Cary was a poet writing in the mid-19th Century, first in her native Ohio and later in New York City, where she also wrote for the Ledger and the Independent, among others. Her poetry and literary journalism aren't particularly known now, but her Clovernook short story cycle was "re-discovered" as part of the reclamation of American women writers in the 1980s-90s by feminist literary critics and academics. Cary thought of herself primarily as a poet, and the Clovernook stories are more focused on tone than structure and have less in common with, say, Sarah Orne Jewett's "Country of the Pointed Firs" cycle than more modernist attempts at the form such as my personal favorite, Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." Cary's sketches are indeed more sketches than stories, involving a fair amount of surrealism and symbolism while ostensibly grounded in a largely domestic sphere of relationships between the townspeople of Clovernook. There is no broad arc to the collection as such, and admittedly there are times the characters seem to exist more for the sake of a point to be made than as part of a larger tapestry. Still, it was a fascinating read for me, and after I'd been at it for over an hour, I got this excited urge, as I'll get sometimes, to try to write something in the vein of what I was reading. I had the day off and no specific plans, so I just dove in.

About three hours later I noticed my stomach rumbling, and decided it was a good time to call the match and see where things stood. Like most of the writing I do, this idea will never get completed or see the light of day in any kind of finished form, but I was actually pretty pleased at my first pass, and decided I'd zip through once to correct spelling or particularly awkwardly worded sentences, and then post it here as a semi-public airing. It started as the beginning of a story that would be somewhere within my cycle, but quickly turned into a preface of sorts, an overview of the setting and some of the main characters and why they're all gathered together. I ended up tending more towards the realistic than the surreal. But like Cary, Jewett, and Anderson, the bulk of the stories would be about town residents as their individual lives are lived and how they criss-cross with each other. While the situations and town itself are invented, the facts about highways, senators, movie stars, occupations, vehicles, and what that area of Kansas was like in 1934 are accurate from either some quick research done alongside the writing or from my own previously learned knowledge of the period. Of course, then real life intervened and it's only now, a few weeks later, that I'm actually posting this. Still, I hope it's an enjoyable quick read. For myself, I'd call it a very happy three hours' work:

The older citizens of Marish, by and large, felt they were unlucky to have a town name that meant “marsh” but also felt lucky that the name hadn’t been Marsh instead of Marish. This was an unspoken feeling among them, as they entered and left the town hall where twice a week they gathered for a bingo and even sometimes a raffle, where on an occasional Saturday night a movie screen would be drawn out from the basement and set up on stage, and the entire town would turn out to watch Claudette Colbert or Errol Flynn. The old folks felt it was almost funny, a town called Marish sitting out on the plains of southwestern Kansas, now as the crops failed from the dust and irrigation was next to impossible and the entire town saw its scrub brush rise and wheat stalks diminish. The old folks had to find things like the town’s name funny in these dark days. The old folks didn’t have much to live for, and they knew it. Frank Mercinton went so far as to kill himself to save his family some milk and eggs, and though no one in town was able to say so, for fear of the three ministers in the town's three churches, there was definite grudging approval of his suicide from some. “He chose his time, which ain’t Christian,” said Marcus Sandy, the town sheriff and second-most-respected man in town behind Wilby Athers, who owned a full third of Marish’s land and had farmed it profitably before the droughts. Sandy spat on the ground outside the general store. The men gathered around him made assenting noises. “But,” Sandy continued, “he did it for the well-being of his family, and timed it before the harvest, so his kin would put him in the ground and work through their grief out in the fields.” Another glot of flem and chaw hit the ground. “Man was neat and clean about it, at least.” And that was the highest public statement of the wearied elder contingent of the town, and was repeated by most of the men standing there to their wives that evening, who told other wives, and widows, and so it got around that feeling a secret admiration of Frank Mercinton was, if not acceptable, understandable and permitted.

Much in Marish in those years was not acceptable and yet permitted. The people were hard because their lives were hard, and the men usually died relatively young from years of brutal labor on their farms. Women lasted either far less time or far more; Aunt Desiah was ninety-two and apart from one niece, her sister Clara’s daughter Moriah, her immediately family had all died, the men mostly going first, in their fifties, a few in their late 40s, including both of Aunt Desiah’s sons. Marish, being in the northeast of Haskell County, wasn’t particularly near route 50 when the highway had been laid in the mid-'20s, and the two byways through town were entirely local, though the 402 joined up with the 83 going south to Sublette and north into Finney County. A little before route 50 came along there had been talk of the railroad in Cimmaron setting up a branch line to Elkhart, which would have connected Marish and a few other lonely towns in the southwestern counties. The farmers were cautiously in favor; certainly Wilby Athers and other prominent farmers were in favor. Senator Capper had even made a stop in the center of town in September 1923 with a stump speech promoting the railroad, and popular opinion was that he spoke both plainly and well, and his traveling car was of proper lineage: a 1918 Ford Model T. But then, for most everyone in town, it was the first time they’d seen a senator outside a newspaper, and perhaps their rugged mistrust of Washington was softened for a while when Washington actually took its hat in hand to come for a brief visit.

Now, almost a decade later, the government men who had started to come through the state offered these strange deals called “subsidies” for their crops, often on crops which hadn’t yet been planted, and these offers made the farmers of Marish grit their teeth and walk out of the town hall in disgust, to curse the wasted two hours they’d spent driving or riding into town and listening to these men in suits and thin mustaches. These men had obviously never worked a farm in their lives, and to hell if the county or town or the farmers would become indebted to their offers of money. The rain would come. The rain needed no government help.

Marish, and indeed, most of Haskell County, had sat apart from most of the state’s dealings for many years; "Bleeding Kansas" hadn’t touched the town much at all. Its settlers hadn’t approved of slavery purely on prideful grounds – if they weren’t the ones plowing and planting and harvesting their own lands, or being employed by the few richer men of the county to do so, they felt less than human in the sight of God and their families. Of consequence there were almost no colored folk in the town or on the outskirts, though a few families were known to be living up past the reservoir, working as paid help on the farms out there. By the townsfolk they were treated no worse than any white hired hand on the outlying farms, and no better either. Bob Torsen, whose family had been of strong Swedish stock, was a towering man at near six and a half feet. He owned the general store – called merely The Store – and permitted no hired hand he didn’t know personally to come inside, though he was fine with them loitering at the hitches out front. If they had orders for their employers, they could come onto the porch and ask for them through the druggist window, and ‘Nancy’ Herrik, a old man who could still hear well enough to get prescription orders right, had instructions to yell for Bob or one of his sons to come deal with these more complex situations.

Bob was a simple man but a logical one, and reasoned quite matter-of-factly that if he didn’t meet people at the town hall during town meetings, or at the Lutheran church on West Street, or at Rosey’s mess-house, they weren’t worth knowing, and not welcome in The Store. Thankfully at least one of these locations included most everyone in town, but extended to fewer of those on surrounding farms. Rosey’s was very much a local phenomenon – the cooking wasn’t good enough to bring people into town. And some of them went to the Lutheran church, but some went to the Baptist or the Methodist, so that segregated them. Mostly everyone went to town hall meetings, but not all, and certainly not hired hands from the far fields who just wanted a meal and a bed after the sun set. So Bob was known for his eccentric views on who could enter his business and who couldn’t. Being the only general goods place in town meant he did well for his family and himself, but behind closed doors the owners of other farms and businesses shook their heads, and many on the outer farms bought from other merchants if they could manage it. Who had ever heard of a store owner keeping people out of his store?

If the truth were told, however, Bob’s eccentricity was only particularly eccentric in that it extended to residents. The people of Marish were not suspicious, as a rule, but strangers were looked at askance if they stayed more than a day and couldn’t provide concrete reasons for it, family or work being the acceptable defaults. A salesman could be assured of a warm welcome, likewise an itinerant farmhand or craftsman most of the time. Even with a good town leatherman in Stince Albert, a new style of making a shoe was something many of the women were eager to examine and perhaps purchase, including the newer shoes made in factories back East. If a traveler were looking for work, that was something else, of course, and often where he ended up working – and if he ended up working at all or moving on down the road – depended on whom he met on coming into town.

Travelers were apt to come in on the 402 since it connected to a state highway, and so they came in eastbound and found themselves in the trade district, among Stince and young Carl the metalworker (who hated being referred to as a blacksmith, because he wasn’t, though he could hammer out a shoe to fit any horse brought to him), and old Michaels the tanner, arms and hands stained the unnatural hue of his trade, and Freddy Mackiney, a new addition to the town, which meant he’d only set up shop five years ago. Freddy didn’t do a brisk business, but it was an essential one: he fixed cars. The machinist’s shop was down on the Rocky Road, and was pretty much the only thing down there, with various combines, tractors, and other farm equipment strewn all over. He fixed them and bought and sold them and every few months got a shipment of parts delivered to The Store for pickup. The parts could be of any size and shape and Bob Torsen always got annoyed at this, so the machinist, a rather happy-go-lucky sort named Ged Orley, always assuaged Bob with an extra five dollars. Ged, who had never married and lived in the same barn where he fixed the smaller farm equipment, was close friends with Freddy. They spoke much the same work language but weren’t in competition for business, and they were both bachelors, though Freddy was 28 and desperate to settle down and Ged was over 50 and had never regretted not having a family.

The tradesmen, by and large, were interested in itinerant help, especially if they were proficient in something other than farming, and so a worker coming eastbound usually was carefully but rather keenly scouted out. If someone came in westbound, however, it was through the local road, called the 25, and they entered Marish at residential farmland, mostly small acreage and only the family to run each farm. Traveling salesmen were welcomed, but other workers were greeted coldly, and if they were looking for a farm job, often received no greeting at all. Most of the people in town never noticed this difference, that the west side of Marish had more transient workers and the east side had fewer, but Marcus Sandy noticed, partly because it was his job, and partly because he was good at his job. He didn’t mind if people feared him. It wasn’t his preference, but he was smart enough to know it was the only way to keep some people in line, and subtle enough to realize that raising his voice once in anger publicly would benefit him for months afterwards as people began to talk and exaggerate what had actually happened. He’d never killed a vagrant squatter on Ross Caubbs' land, but when the town gossips would trot out the story every harvest when migrant workers were coming through more often, Sandy never gave any indication it wasn’t true. In reality he’d run off a few old coots who were sniffing around Ross’s still, which Edith Caubbs, Ross’s wife, didn’t know about, so her husband told her the sheriff had run off some sturdy middle-aged squatters. How Edith had turned that into a killing neither man quite knew, but both kept their mouths shut. Ross liked his whisky and the sheriff liked how passionately Edith told the story.

Marcus Sandy kept quiet about many things that happened during those years in that town. The only reason I know about them at all is because, when old Marcus was dying, he would keep his mind off his pain by telling me all these stories, taking great care to tell me the actual truth of them. He’d always been proud of how I’d gone off to college, and had had a better life than he did, but he never quite forgave me for studying history. “It’s only what seems true to the guy who wrote it down, whenever he got it into his head to write it down,” he would say, spitting onto his blankets. “I don’t blame you, Sam, but true history is from those who was there, not in some book written years later by somebody weren’t even alive then.” I knew better than to disagree with him, and besides, I wanted to hear about the Depression and the old town and the old people who had lived their lives in Marish, named after a marsh that had never existed. I wanted to hear about my father, and why he’d done the beautiful and the awful things he’d done.

Movies I No Longer Like

2010-10-13T23:57:00.003-04:00

That's probably too extreme, but it makes a nice title. Following up on my big movie project from this summer, to rewatch approximately 120 movies I've seen and added to my "best-of" list, I've written already about how it wasn't too amazing a project for me. Most of the films stayed pretty much exactly where they landed the first time I watched them. However, 34 dropped out of those "best-of" lists, some a little bit and some a lot. Here's 9 of those titles in no particular order and why, in the end, I just can't recommend them as outstanding films anymore.

title - year released - director - stars

Strange Days - 1995 - Kathryn Bigelow - Ralph Finnes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore.
Some of these movies are good, but not quite amazing, while others I've just done a 180 on. Strange Days is among the latter. Its central conceit, which is still a great germ of an idea, involves the ultimate in virtual reality: a device that records someone's brainwaves during any experience and then, with the help of a pad of electrodes that fits on the head plus a "tape deck" containing the recorded experience, lets another person live that experience. Various scenes are shot first-person as people re-live experiences; the opening scene, involving a robbery-gone-wrong, is one of the most gripping opening scenes of any movie I've seen, and another scene is one of the most emotionally scarring cinema experiences I've ever had, involving the rape and murder of a woman as experienced by the male rapist. The plot circles around a man who deals illegally in the "tapes" of experiences involving sex and death, with a millennarian subplot, as the events take place on the last days of December 1999. I couldn't get it out of my head for weeks after I saw it. However, looking back again, though I still could barely watch the above-mentioned scenes, I realized the rest of the movie was simply awful: awful acting, awful direction (I don't care if Bigelow just won the Oscar; that was for a different movie 15 years later), awful plotting, and a dumb, saccharine ending you can see coming from halfway through the picture. I'm going to call it the 1990s equivalent of Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou: crass, pretentious, and useless apart from one truly disturbing, disgusting scene.

A Simple Plan - 1998 - Sam Raimi - Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, Bridget Fonda.
Time was when I liked really slow movies. I mean really...slow...movies. About the only movies I felt were too slow were Yasujirô Ozu's, which are glacial. I saw A Simple Plan during that time, and it still holds up for the most part as a modern-day character study in how a good man can be tempted by greed and make choices that lead to the destruction of all he loves. The acting is good, the direction is subtle and understated. And the story takes forever and a day to develop. So if you're in the mood for that kind of thing, I recommend it. But it feels very slow to me now, especially on a second viewing. It's like when I saw Inception with my friend Frosty: we agreed afterwards that it was excellent, but that watching it a second time would be horribly slow knowing how everything was going to end.

Interiors - 1978 - Woody Allen - Diane Keaton, Kristin Griffith, Mary Beth Hurt, Geraldine Page, E.G. Marshall, Jean Stapleton, Sam Waterston, Richard Jordan.
Apparently Woody Allen made this movie to try to out-Bergman Bergman, and there's a decent case to be made that he did so. (Of course you'll ask if any of Bergman's films were on my "best-of" lists, and yes, The Seventh Seal stayed but Through a Glass Darkly didn't.) For my own part, I suspect Interiors made my best-of list initially because it was the first (and only) Woody Allen picture I even halfway liked. I still halfway like it, but not enough to keep it on the list. Also, I saw it for the first time during grad school, and the characters of Renata and Frederick as the disaffected writer and academic respectively, one successful and the other not, were people I felt like I lived among at that time, so it was fascinating to me to see them psychologically dissected. Intended as a very cold portrait of almost all its characters, it succeeds admirably, but now I find myself being affected by that coldness myself, and so off the list into the freezing ocean like Geraldine Page it tumbles.

Three Kings - 1999 - David O. Russell - George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, Spike Jonze.
I was hoping this movie's characters and caper plot would outbalance the fact that the Gulf War was 20 years ago, but frankly, the Gulf War feels 40 years old at this point with our past decade of suspicions, occupations, and wars in Iraq and Afganistan. The jaunty atittude towards the Gulf War, intended as satire, worked as such before 9/11, but seems out of place now. Still a good story, still interesting characters, still some fine acting, but not particularly relevant in the way it used to be.

Life as a House - 2001 - Irwin Winkler - Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Hayden Christensen, Jena Malone, Mary Steenburgen.
I really wanted to still like this movie. It took two days after rewatching it to admit to myself it didn't belong in my top lists anymore. Hayden Christensen really is a train wreck of an actor. This came out before the Star Wars prequels he appeared in, but his acting is still quite bad, and though Kevin Kline's character is central to the story, Christensen's character, as his son, drives most of the plot. The ensemble cast was part of what attracted me to the story, of a man (Kline) who learns he's dying and tries to accomplish the two things he's most wanted: reconciling with his ex-wife and son, and building a house. But only some of it works. Jena Malone and Mary Steenburgen turn in excellent performances, but Kline is hit and miss, mostly because the script itself is hit and miss, with a too-perfect ending that feels structured rather than written. Between Kristin Scott Thomas's characteristic blandness as an actress, and the aforementioned train wreck, there just wasn't enough oomph to keep the movie from falling out of favor with me.

The January Man - 1989 - Pat O'Connor - Kevin Kline, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Harvey Keitel, Susan Sarandon, Alan Rickman, Danny Aiello, Rod Steiger.
If Life as a House was a difficult choice to keep or drop, The January Man was clearly a loser by the end of the first half hour. I think I must have been on a combo Kevin Kline/John Patrick Shanley kick; in my list of movies the first time around, I saw this soon after seeing both A Fish Called Wanda and Moonstruck. The second time around, it's clear in Life as a House that Kline is trying hard to work with the material; here, it's clear he knows the script is a complete mess, and is just having fun with it. Shanley, always hit or miss as a playwright, is the same as a scriptwriter. Supposedly about the hunt for a serial killer, the movie tries to be a comedy about brothers who are personal and professional rivals. If that sounds rather stupid, that's because it is.

A Map of the World - 1999 - Scott Elliott - Sigourney Weaver, Julianne Moore, David Strathairn.
Back in the "slow movies" category, A Map of the World is one of those overwrought melodramas dripping with self-pity and self-flagellation. A mother, looking after the daughter of a friend, accidentally become preoccupied with work and her friend's daughter drowns, the film chronicling the personal, professional, and legal consequences. It's instructive to me that, looking over my full list of movies over the past 12 years, this is the only film of that type to appear on my best-of lists. It probably never belonged there to begin with, though I honestly don't know why it moved me as much as it did when I saw it. David Strathairn is one of my favorite living actors, and the three leads do indeed put in excellent performances, but watching it again was like nails on a chalkboard for me.

American Beauty - 1999 - Sam Mendes - Kevin Spacey, Annette Benning, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Peter Gallagher, Chris Cooper, Allison Janney.
Sam Mendes seems to like directing films where the predominant theme is whining about how unfair life is. He favors style over substance and seems to think flashiness counts towards character development. Rewatching American Beauty was one of the biggest surprises for me this summer, as I had loved the movie when I'd originally seen it in college, finding it funny and poignant and racy and good-hearted all at the same time. But Mendes is really just skipping from one scene to another, assuming it will all add up to something. (The same is true of his other films: Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road, and Away We Go. And all of them except Road to Perdition have main characters who spend most of the movie whining.) American Beauty was Alan Ball's breakout script, of course, and the quirky characters are interesting, if relatively plastic. But having become a one-trick pony with the same lawn-furniture people whose lives revolve around sex and death in Six Feet Under and True Blood, his charm is pretty well lost on me now. Kevin Spacey still owns the film and turns in an outstanding performance, with a fully realized character who grows and changes. But the rest of the cast can't do much with the caricatures they've been handed (and Birch, Bentley, and Suvari were never good actors to begin with). The pithy cliches about finding and enjoying beauty in life didn't hold up either: the iconic scene of watching the video of the plastic bag in the wind felt just shy of a self-parody. All in all, I realized two things about American Beauty: it's a story I've seen replayed many times from the writer and director since, and the essential point is to celebrate irresponsibility as freedom, which I have to say is an ideology most people I know grew out of after college.

Days of Heaven - 1978 - Terrence Malick - Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz.
However, if I feel badly about any movie being on this list of cast-offs, it's this one, a film that when I saw it in grad school, haunted me for a week afterwards and a short story I wrote was partially inspired by it. In 1916 Chicago, a man working in a steel mill accidentally kills his boss, and he, his little sister, and his girlfriend go on the run, finding work as migrant fieldhands in the Texas Panhandle. It's the kind of movie I instantly warm to, where the hardness and the beauty of life meet and mix in emotional ways. The cinematography is breathtaking, and at least a third of the film really is just static or slowly panned shots, of fields, farms, workers walking home at sunset, locusts chewing, a child playing in the dirt, the wind through wheat, the way a bonnet string hangs down across a woman's neck and shoulder. The film, like most of Malick's work, relies far more on images than words, and what's most important in the words is what's unsaid. But the story itself hangs on a brilliant conceit: there's a narrator, the young sister, who is both naive and wise in the way a child can be. Her voice, as a character, was what sealed the film's place in my best-of lists. And finally, that voice and that conceit was what undid my connection with the film, though not my affection or admiration. In a way, all visual storytellers hoodwink their audience to locate and convey meaning, and I can't fault that; truthfully, I love that aspect of the movies (or television or comics). But it was with a growing disappointment that, as I rewatched Days of Heaven, I could see how threadbare the child's character and function as narrator was, and when a monologue near the end, which I'd previously been transported by, fell on my ears with a dull clank, I knew in the intervening years I'd changed, just enough, to have moved on from it all. It was that same small moment I've known before, that certainty you can hold between your thumb and forefinger, tiny, but inescapably there, when love has gone.

But not all love dies. Eventually I'll get around to posting about a different set of movies which I rewatched and found even more to get excited about than I had the first time...