Promkiln

There’s a line in Warren Perkins’ Putrefaction Live, when a character sits in a jail cell organizing the ambient sounds around him into music: It was the only way he knew to do nothing and yet be creative, actually dwelling inside music itself. My job is hardly a prison, but I sometimes feel like that there, locked in a task but my mind spinning ceaselessly. The only creative act I’m really allowed is the discovery of connections between songs and the art of suppressed crying, pushing myself as close against the threshold of tears as I can in public (I’ve said it before, some songs, including most by The Beach Boys, are just too intense for the workplace). So this blog is useful, because if I let these creative impulses remain internal and forget how to transpose them into writing, I’ll probably end up in an asylum one day drawing spirals on the walls.

1. I got knocked out, down, and around, all in the safety of my chair, and more than ever before, by the vocal from The Four Tops’ “Ask the Lonely,” and was wondering what my all-time favorite vocal performances have in common. The two others that come most immediately to mind are Michael Stipe’s voice-cracking giddiness on “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” and Andy McCluskey’s deep croon turned heartache crescendo on OMD’s “International.” The verdict: amount of singing is certainly a common thread, but that’s the musical equivalent of Oscar-bait, so I’ll say instead… I love vocals that exist moment to moment, keying us into the singer’s every feeling through every turn of phrase, while still making a coherent emotional statement by song’s end. No surprise that The Four Tops would make my list, given the soul-boiling exuberance in all their songs. They have the added benefit of having recorded in the 60s, their voices too large to be contained by the fidelity of the LP, so that everything bleeds together in a joyous mush.

2. Can man-made things take on a reality of their own? Kelefa Sanneh, in the bright spot of a recent brain-hurting article about whiteness, says it’s important we remember the way forgeries can become genuine, the way categories people make cannot simply be unmade. Does this mean that the thing we call the 1980s is in a sense “real,” and has a sound? Because I don’t know how else to explain the way The Replacements’ “Answering Machine” sounds, except that some physical manifestation of time itself—the year “1984,” as we’ve defined it—left its ghostly vapor all over the recording apparatus. There are textures in that song way beyond Paul’s anguish… so spooky.

3. Wye Oak’s The Knot is an album I’ll always regret not top-tenning, but I also find myself making minor cosmetic changes to it whenever I listen. The gently shuffling rhythm of “I Want For Nothing,” for example, could be celebrated for its amorphousness, I suppose, but every time it gets to the chorus I get a bit worried. There’s a beat missing or a splice somewhere before the word “want,” and while the song retains its gentle vibe through this weird moment, there’s nothing gentle about the effect it has on me. But this is a minor complaint; the song and album are tops.

4. When I make definitive statements about things I don’t much care for, I think I owe you all occasional updates whenever I reform my feelings. So today I have to give Animal Collective credit for “Bluish,” a magnificent song that ideally would have provided Merriweather Post Pavilion with a stronger guiding force and a better title. Elsewhere on the album, the vocals are all about what modern progressive males want and need—to be out in the flowers, not material things, to walk around with you, to do just what my body wants to. “Bluish,” by not straining to make a statement, by being just a beautiful moment suspended in time—the mundane made underwater fantasy—says everything that the album’s more brazen anthems fail to say, no matter how loud they shout it. To wit: We live inside our brains, and with drugs or open eyes can make the world as beautiful or ugly as we choose. The album as a whole tries to enact this “way of seeing” life’s minor moments, but too often turns to rallying cries when it should turn inward. “Bluish” trusts you to get it, and doesn’t tell you you have to.

5. Courtney Love only says the word “feminist” once on Live Through This, but is the album the definitive feminist text of the 1990s? I think so. I’ve never heard an album in such furious pursuit of a theme. Now with Ms. Love’s comeback, everyone seems to remember that she was an important figure because of her “rebel attitude,” but really she was great because of the things she wrote. Like: They say I’m plump, but I throw up all the time. She never made any of this sound pleasant.

2010

I've racked up some more albums. A lot of them are great.

[a] Surfer Blood, Astro Coast : Timeless as the riffage is, this is an album that couldn’t have existed any time other than the present. I don’t remember singers having voices like this in the pre-Panda Bear era, although it hardly seems like an affectation. Anyway, I once claimed I didn’t want to hear this band until they found a way to make their name irrelevant like The Beach Boys did. But then I remembered The Beach Boys’ greatness was always at least partly defined by their name. And then I heard this album, which is pretty groovy. This is legitimate surfer music, though it doesn’t sound composed under a wave so much as in a cabin on the beach, bonfires outside the window in the dark surf night. That’s “Harmonix” anyway, the Breeders-imbibing best song here.

[b] Owen Pallett, Heartland : Hear this one with a lover of classical music. You will hear it more fully. Most of my music listening is done alone, so I sometimes forget how a song can really open up when you’re wondering what someone else is thinking about it. This is a lovely album any way you hear it, but also a fairly difficult one. Like Patrick Wolf, Owen Pallett makes no concessions to his listeners, and may seem all the more impenetrable because he never sings about his own situation, instead builds weird architectures of meta-biography around himself. I’m still enchanted by the music and haven’t yet taken a look at the lyrics, but even so you can get an instant fix by hearing the words out of context. Pallett’s escalation of I’m never gonna give it to you’s is the sexiest thing I’ve heard all year, even if it’s not supposed to function as a throwaway hook.

[c] jj, no 3 : Some have been comparing this to Enya as a shorthand way of saying the album’s no good. Little do these critics know that I grew up listening to Enya; even if the comparison wasn’t bogus, which it is, shouldn’t there be a further explanation of why jj’s proximity to Enya degrades the experience of listening to their music? Because I fail to see it, and instead see another critic’s failure to engage with an artist’s music by way of a tired assumption of a New Age star’s inherent crappiness. Let’s also leave out the seasons in our discussion of jj, as everyone seems to have their seasons all mixed up in regard to this band. If no 3 isn’t summer as experienced from beneath a musty quilt, I don’t know what is. But before I risk becoming an entirely reactionary music writer, let me say something positive/positivist. I predict that jj will grow increasingly minimal from here, that their many influences will register in only the smallest ways: the rhythms of an a cappella vocal, an old rhyme laid bare. Opener “My Life” is this group’s raison d’etre, highlighting our chanteuse’s ability to just sing, and not tell you she’s doing homage.

[d] The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night : I think the Lakes have set before themselves the challenge of perfection this time around, and have come pretty close to the mark. This is not one of those albums that arrive at perfection through some accident of disorganized inspiration, but one that must get there through diligence and obsession over every detail. So while you can tell the effort that went into these songs, every drum fill calculated for maximum momentum (I now count Kevin Laing as one of my favorite drummers), they also never feel stifled. Indeed, “Chicago Train” and “Albatross” are supremely lifting, tossing your body aloft with all the abandon you would expect from a band that can turn the rockin’ into the reverential.

[e] Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me : This contains some of the best music of the year, and none of the worst. Newsom famously doesn’t listen to other people’s music when she’s working on a project, and it shows, but by shutting out the culture machine has she created a greater articulation of what it’s like to live in the world in 2010? I think she has, even if she only uses that fullness of experience to imagine the past from the present, which she does charmingly, hauntingly, in “’81,” a transportive, enchanted vision of olde times that puts her in the company of Vashti Bunyan. Elsewhere she channels early Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell, so her bearings are straight even if she’s following her own muse.

[f] Beach House, Teen Dream : The music world of today is chock full of teen dreams, but Beach House’s aptly titled new disc presents something of a reversal. This is not the sound of adults pining for lost youth and old sounds, but the sound of youth dreaming toward adulthood, learning the emotions and wisdom that can sometimes be hidden inside music. This young dreamer I’ve conjured is not in the music, of course, but that’s one way it might be heard. Did you ever have an album in your collection that was a sort of challenge, that you weren’t immediately ready for, but when you were it made you wiser even as it baffled? Was the album Sister Lovers, or London Calling? Teen Dream could be that album for someone today. This is the “album of the year” so far, which is more a statement of fact than opinion. I would venture that Alex Scally Victoria Legrand has the greatest voice in music today. When he she has the right material, he she can turn a song inside out, with a one-of-a-kind soulfulness that everyone’s been wanting but not getting since Alex Chilton.

[g] The Radio Dept., Clinging To A Scheme : But here’s my “favorite” of the year at the moment. The title may be descriptive, but I’m fairly new to The Dept, and I don’t think any artist ought to be faulted for a relentless pursuit of his obsessions, unless the returns start to diminish, which they don’t, here. There are a number of contexts in which this album can be enjoyed, none of them incorrect (I suspect one involves Owl City, so it goes). The most interesting angle I’ve found is to imagine that the magic spirit of ’89—the one that gave us De La Soul, Paul’s Boutique, and Keith Haring—migrated to Sweden sometime in the past 20 years and has found perfect expression on Clinging To A Scheme. Perhaps that ignores how insular these songs really are, but oh my, those punchy burbly horns on “Heaven’s On Fire,” that introductory audio clip that I think is probably not but in a way could be the voice of Thurston Moore, the chiming barking piano on “David” (more hip hop ’96 than ’89)—it all just seems more fully-realized and more fun than on other recent albums I’ve heard. Whether the Dept. are clinging to a scheme or reinventing the scheme-wheel, I wouldn’t know, but this is a wonderful album.

[h] Broken Bells, Broken Bells : This may privilege atmosphere over songwriting, as some have argued, but it still strikes me as a pretty thorough blending of two distinct sensibilities. The seams never show, which makes me think that this was a match made in heaven, or that James Mercer and Danger Mouse are both just really good at self-effacement. As a result, these songs are tame almost to a fault. I never doubt their intentions, but still, shouldn’t artists who are so capable of making exciting music want to be making something a bit more… exciting?

Now I will rank them.

a→i, b→o, c→l, d→m, e→k, f→r, g→p, h→n

1. p
2. r
3. o
4. m
5. k
6. i
7. l
8. n

24

[I will put something here about the television show 24, once I have time to get it right.]

G-BOOK

The stories in Low Moon represent Jason at his best. His genius can be summed up in one word, pacing, which I don’t think is a simplification but proof that one small idea can be plenty inspiration for a life’s work. The two best stories in the collection are the ones that play on this strength. “&” alternates page-by-page between two different stories, laying bare his process as they progress in startling and contrasting ways; “You Are Here” takes place across a span of decades, giving abstracts like ellipsis and pattern their proper tragic dimensions.


I’ve worked up a list of books for spring/early summer reading:

Black Cherries by the notable Montanan Grace Stone Coates.
Scorsese by Ebert.
Herr Bognanni’s House of Tomor-Row.
Cold Water Flat’s Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Tinkers.
The Film Writing of James Agee.
Colson Whitehead’s Intuitionist.
The Habit of Being Flannery O’Connor (Letters).

What should I expedite to the top? (Hint: I won’t get around to any of this unless I quit my job(s).)

THE-DREAM

This was supposed to go in my homecoming post two posts ago, but I forgot. My last night in St. Paul, I had a dream in which I had gotten off the bus in Helena and was walking along Euclid Avenue at the beginning of summer. Euclid is an ugly street in reality, but as I was walking, the sidewalk was lined with trees in bloom, so overwhelmingly vivid that I laughed and cried the whole way. I don’t know if I’ve experienced the loveliness of summer more fully than I did in that dream, and while it all seems a bit less magical now that springtime has truly arrived, I still think about how my vision of a stroll bodes well for everything.

The Famous Johnny Cash Shackles Scholarship*

I have a new job where I can pretty much listen to music all day. Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:

MONDAY
[a] The Flaming Lips, Embryonic
[b] Frank Sinatra, Watertown
[c] St. Vincent, Actor
[d] The Black Watch, Tatterdemalion

TUESDAY
[e] Imperial Teen, What Is Not To Love
[f] jj, no 2
[g] Deerhunter, Rainwater Cassette Exchange, Fluorescent Grey
[h] Black Tambourine, Black Tambourine [comp.]
[i] The Tough Alliance, The New School

WEDNESDAY
[j] Sam Phillips, The Indescribable Wow
[k] Marshall Crenshaw, Marshall Crenshaw
[l] Moonshake, Eva Luna
[m] Th’ Faith Healers, Lido
[n] The Decemberists, Always the Bridesmaid, The Hazards of Love

THURSDAY
[o] Modern English, After the Snow
[p] Boards of Canada, from The Campfire Headphase, In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country
[q] A.R. Kane, Sixty Nine
[r] Sloan, Never Hear the End of It, Pretty Together

FRIDAY
[s] Sloan, Navy Blues, Between the Bridges
[t] The Hidden Cameras, Awoo, Origin: Orphan
[u] The Everly Brothers, Cadence Classics, “Cathy’s Clown”

[a] Embryonic is workplace poison, it turns out. “Enjoyment” was never the chief pleasure to be derived from this album, and on the job, when the time to enjoy is scarce and the time to contemplate even scarcer, Embryonic is a freaky death shudder that you worry might be leaking from your headphones and scaring your co-workers. But I still admire it.

[b] Ol’ Blue Eyes’ melancholy little gem from the Tricky Dick years is the rare LP that makes me care about love as it existed in the early 70s, and one of my all-time favorite works of fiction. Watertown has been a continual catalyst for my writing aspirations, and also a painful reminder that I’ll never write anything very good. And as for the vocals, just listen to the way Sinatra sings these phrases:

--hangin’ ‘round (“Watertown”): The History of Human Resignation to Cruel Fate could be written about this moment.

--but he’s so old (“Michael & Peter”): The History of Emotion could be written about this moment.

[c] I still love every moment of this album.

[d] Every time someone earns a Ph.D. and continues to make music like this, my hope grows a little stronger.

[e] I used to consider this one of my very favorite albums, not because it was, but because I recognized and aspired to a certain type of coolness that this album so coolly represented. Did Imperial Teen anticipate an entire generation when they wrote a song about a girl who's a "major in self-portraiture"?

[f] If jj wasn’t so intent on being so minimal, they could have titled this album with a paraphrase of their finest lyric: The Truth We Shared & The Lies That Drove Us Apart.

[g] Are these lyrics true? They are so wrenching! “Game of Diamonds” is another workplace danger, this time the danger of being overcome with feelings that can’t be dealt with in private. The lyrics throughout Rainwater Cassette Exchange seem more carefully thought out than in the rest of the band’s catalog, or maybe Brad C. is becoming an effortless master of his greatest themes: watch your skin erupting … all sickness and sorrow … two weeks of misery … then the opening couplet of “Game” will make you shed one tear, made a deluge when you hear the rest of what might be the band’s closest thing to a Stipe-ean ballad. Indeed, I haven’t often thought of Deerhunter as a Southern band, but I’ve started to realize that many of the colors and textures in their music produce in me feelings that only the most tangled and pungent of R.E.M. does.

Deerhunter’s music has likewise been a creativity catalyst in my recent life, mostly inspiring me to think of ways I might infiltrate the band. You know those books of published letters between famous literary types? I’ve been imagining striking up an electronic correspondence with Bradford Cox, and the ensuing book of our communications. I don’t know whether this book would exist on paper, but either way it would have a cover:


[h] Not the greatest early 90s band with a pop song sentimentality swaddled in lots of distortion and charming lack of chops (a quality that always strikes me as an addition to rather than a subtraction from a band’s sound). But the point isn’t how good they are, but whether you like them enough to wear their button on your sweater. Mine’s already full up on buttons—Heavenly, Confetti, Vaselines, Young Marble Giants, 14 Iced Bears—but I’m sure I can find Black Tambourine a bit of space somewhere.

[i] Maybe the ultimate Swedish album of the last decade, not because it’s the best, but because it has perhaps the greatest global crossover potential, comes closest to embodying the way Swedish music straddles the line between Anglophilic pop and world music (from our perspective), the way these new Swedish groups identify with and borrow from a surprising array of movements and cultures. Released in 2005, the year before the arrival of most of the new crew, The New School couldn’t have a more perfect title, and contains some of the hookiest songs of recent years.

[j] Marshall Crenshaw with boobs.

[k] Sam Phillips with balls, which I don’t really mean figuratively, as Sam Phillips has plenty of figurative balls.

[l] One of many albums from the WMCN library that hasn’t really been earning its keep on my hard drive these past years. Now I remember why I never want to listen to this: I don’t like it very much. The album cover suggests the best twee pop band you’ve never heard, but in fact, as their name implies, Moonshake are Can acolytes. I’m sure this was well and good in 1993, when Moonshake’s weird fusion was a sign o’ the times, but good as I usually am at entering a frame of mind that can make anything antiquated sound sleek and sexy, or regressing to my childhood ears that would have loved this band, some coolness is just impossible to reclaim. Sorry, Moonshake, I bet the ’94 grads love you still.

[m] Ditto these Faith Healers, one of the best songs here is a cover of Can’s “Mother Sky.” Th’ Healers have been retroactively lumped in with the early 90s shoegazing scene, and while they lay it on thick and create some great trancelike passages, they’re a more artful offshoot of the million-selling grunge scene. They were never one of “my” bands, so I have some trouble journeying back and carrying them with me to the present day.

[n] Colin Meloy is having a great career, isn’t he? Always the Bridesmaid was a songbook expander in 2008, as routine as a dental checkup but also quite good, while The Hazards of Love was the most underrated album of 2009. It took me a while to come around to it, as I’ve always resisted the theatrical ambitions of The Decemberists, and a “rock opera” seemed to promise that they’d be indulging in everything I like least about them. But the huge hour-long momentum that the album generates has nothing to do with its storyline and everything to do with its monster riffs, well-considered motifs and incomparable female voices.

[o] Still amazed how exquisitely rhythmic and twinkling this album is, considering that its hit single “I Melt With You” is a lot more lumbering than my early memories of it.

[p] “’84 Pontiac Dream” is the song that comes closest to describing what the world seemed like to me when I was 18, living in a weird new city. 18’s the age when everyone ought to have a life soundtrack.

[q] For much of this album I can hang my head in total surrender to the glorious wash of proto-shoe weirdness (though at work I can only imagine myself doing this), but when the music fails to pull me inside its enchanted womb, through no fault of its own, it can be a bit boring.

[r] Maybe it’s cruel to choose just one, but Never Hear the End of It has a clear standout, and that’s “Fading Into Obscurity,” the only song I can think of (maybe because it gets it so right and “obscures” all other attempts) about the titular subject, told from the point-of-view of a former rock star. Sloan can seem a bit straight-laced at times, in their notions of rock music and proper lyrical matter, but they do a story song like no other, and are always ready to surprise with sly genius: This cake is baked but I much prefer the batter / Perhaps in part because it had so much potential / To be delicious and still be influential. Zippo! Pretty Together has some moments, but had I heard it in 2001 I would not have guessed the band’s finest music was still in front of them. How they went from album #6 obsolescence to album #8 magnificence I don’t quite know.

[s] But maybe their fourth and fifth albums provide a clue. It seems there’s always been an ebb and flow to Sloan’s career: Navy Blues is another hit-or-miss affair, while Between the Bridges, though also not perfect, is a great synthesis of four very different songwriting perspectives and an early attempt at the concept-album-without-a-concept that found perfection on Never Hear the End of It.

[t] The notion that Joel Gibb shouldn’t be allowed to grow up, but should stay young and horny (and faggy and polyamorous) forever, was the thesis of some of the most infuriating music “criticism” I read last year. The great thing about Gibb’s rapturous adoration of the human body has never been the “fun” of it, but rather the opportunity it affords to glimpse a sensibility so loving that everything hateful and ugly seems banished from the world. Origin: Orphan is not an album about “growing up,” but one that is tweaked ever so slightly toward seriousness, because Gibb has realized that his love’s abundance is inherently political, and because he’s taking less for granted. But the playfulness persists: his declaration that he will “marry one day” is just about the most tentative promise a person can make, and he says it in a song called “In The Na,” whose nonsense title becomes a giddy refrain that puts a glaze of fantasy over everything. He won’t marry outside the Na, it’s clear, and the only place on Earth where the Na exists must be in Gibb’s bed.

[u] I’d hesitate to call these brothers Everly total iconoclasts, but there are moments in even their tamest songs that signal to me how far from safe they are:

--looks like we’re duped again (“Wake Up, Little Susie”): sung with the sort of excessive human energy, like a boy playing with a dead snake, that makes mothers worry about their sons.

--mmmmmmmm (“’Til I Kissed You”): as lustful as the best of Elvis.

--don’t you even care? (“Cathy’s Clown”): sung like the definition of sullenness.

--“Since You Broke My Heart”: with the right decoration, would be the essence of psychedelic rock.

It’s fun to try to find narrative arcs on greatest hits albums, especially ones that are arranged chronologically. Cadence Classics oscillates between songs about girls who unfairly break the brothers’ hearts and songs about bad boys whose rebel ways cause them to lose their loves, so I imagine that there’s an element of wish fulfillment in these latter songs, that the Everlys wish they could be active participants, not passive, in their failings at love.



Announcement: Of late I barely have time to write down ideas for posts I want to write, but expect more substantial posts soon, including my lengthy (and mostly impartial) Gaga review.



*The title of the post comes from a dream I had in which I was reading about a new movie starring Jim Carrey and George Clooney that was getting considerable Oscar buzz. The unlikely premise of this movie (based on a true story) was that two guys determined to create a college scholarship for underprivileged students, and short on funds to do so, had laid claim to Johnny Cash’s prison chains before the singer’s famous stint in jail, knowing that the shackles could be auctioned upon his release to great advantage. In this version of the universe, Johnny Cash had done time.

You Can Go Home, Again, Or: Keep The Spoons Clean

Things I did in St. Paul:

-Fulfilled my dream of reading Joe Brainard on a city bus (New Work, 1973).

-Remembered how there’s nothing more depressing than cable news in bus stations.

-Other people’s dishes.

-In Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You, found a sort of doppelganger, a kindred spirit who also endured the torment of being told to “say fuck” by classmates, a torture at least a little better than being asked to “smile” or “not be so quiet,” as it shows a certain respect for Chester’s innate goodness.

-Joined a folk-rock duo:



What next?

-A sequence of stark micro-stories?

-Start a Mega Upload account and share some old compositions?

-My proposal for a 33 1/3 book about My Favorite’s The Happiest Days Of Our Lives, plus an appreciation of John Darnielle’s Master Of Reality?

-A track-by-track look at Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster [Deluxe]?

-A trip to Spindle Nation?

-Flyers for my top ten imaginary concerts, and/or covers for my top ten imaginary albums?

-What I’m reading, with commentary?


Tell me what you’d like to see.

A Rant, A Rave, A Reverie, A Request, A Roll Call, Au Revoir

When I listen to the horrible songs on the radio, and its shameful array of pleas for my attention (yes, Ke$ha, I can hear you just fine, and your valley girl cackle will rattle in my grave; Orianthi, you’ve played the Eddie Van Halen solo from “Beat It” live with MJ himself, so why is your female empowerment anthem so stupid and all about what some guy thinks about you?), I try to hear good songs in my head, but they seem equally horrible firing through my contaminated synapses. Christopher Owens, you sound whiny and out for my ears when I imagine “Lust for Life” pulsing under the din of Seacrest unjamz, although you are in fact totally genuine in your longing and your eagerness to have a good time. That can’t be said of the good times charades they play in all these depressingly peppy pop songs. I sometimes wonder if there is some unacknowledged contest of silent masochism going on among the world’s top 40 radio listeners, to see who will hold out the longest and who will be the first to go on a mass murder spree. Lady Gaga and Rihanna (songs with musical qualities and human feeling, respectively? What a notion!), plus an occasional and shockingly decontextualized “Losing My Religion,” continue to be the only relatively bright spots of my forays into radioland, that headache place where everything sounds so shoddy that there must be nary a bitrate over 60.


All the critics are talking about Make Way For Tomorrow, the New Deal-era Leo McCarey masterpiece about real life, now being rediscovered thanks to the Criterion Collection. I hate to use the word “rediscovered,” which implies a narrative in which this film has been done a historical disservice by not being seen and is now being done a favor by the newfound appreciation society that has gathered around it. It’s interesting to ponder the tangled byways of history that have kept this one out of the collective consciousness, but if this is indeed a “rediscovery,” it’s only to our benefit. In the many appraisals of Make Way For Tomorrow I have read on the inter-nest, the consensus is that one must be amazed to consider that a movie so oblivious to Hollywood convention was made there in 1937, and that this is the saddest movie ever made (quoth Orson Welles). I don’t have anything to add to those truths, but let me mention that this movie belongs in the company of world cinema’s great films about old age (The Last Laugh, Tokyo Story, Umberto D), and, dare I suggest it, is the least sentimental and most artful and heart-wrenching of them all. I learn that McCarey encouraged improvisation on the set, and I wonder if only in a collaborative medium like film, and in such an environment as McCarey fostered, do you end up with a work of art as beautifully objective as this one. I rarely make a distinction between high art and low art, but when I see a movie like Make Way For Tomorrow, it is obvious that its method of storytelling is what we should all strive for.

Lastly, the film includes one of my new all-time favorite shots, a sly wink at the camera and a complete reversal of those shots, so common in early American movies, in which an on-screen male spectator allows you entry into the pleasures he beholds. I don’t know if we have the director or the actress to thank for the moment, but it is so surprising, such a challenge to the voyeur, in an offhand sort of way, that an entire tradition of film theory could be devoted to it.


Speaking of great shots, they abound in A Single Man, but I think my favorite might be one that tracks Colin Firth and Matthew Goode through a crowded postwar seaside bar and captures a sublime and subtle choreography in which a woman tries to pick Goode up, he claims to be taken, and she passes by with her back to Firth. It’s an overwhelmingly vivid moment, shot straight from the recesses of our single man’s memory, and like all such great moments in the film, blurs the line between memory and fantasy. A passage from My Antonia sent me reeling back to it, and beyond: “As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: ‘Optima dies…prima fugit.’” (The best days are the first to flee.) I suppose our greatest fantasies and our greatest memories have the shared quality of being the brightest images in our brains.


I am pushing for my work to book the film Prodigal Sons, for all of us who missed it at Plymouth Congregational Church when it was traveling the “community dialogue” circuit last year. Mostly I am envious to mine the documentary for its novelistic details: a handsome high school football star returning to Montana as a handsome woman; an adopted and antagonistic brother with a traumatic brain injury and a famous genius for a blood relative. Clearly there is some great author in the sky who has made these lives so ripe to be fictionalized, though I don’t want to belittle the pain they’ve been through. That much of this takes place in my hometown is all the more astonishing. If you watched Oprah’s interview with director Kimberly Reed recently, you may have seen shots of Reed wandering the Helena Middle School track, just down Rodney Street from my home.


Here are my Oscar favorites in the top eight categories. Full disclosure: I haven’t seen The Blind Side, The Last Station, The Messenger, and Nine.

Picture: Up In The Air
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Actor: Colin Firth
Actress: Gabourey Sidibe
Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz
Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique
Original Screenplay: A Serious Man
Adapted Screenplay: Up In The Air


See you all after my trip, or during.

Coward 2: Magnetic Boogaloo

This may be too little too late, but in celebration of the release of The Magnetic Fields’ Realism (and, now, the resurfacing of some pre-Fields recordings by The Zinnias, a band I hadn’t known I needed to hear), here’s a list of my 10 favorite Magnetic Fields songs. I did a similar thing when R.E.M.’s Accelerate came out, and that proved fairly divisive, as any such small sampling of an awesome songbook will do, so I’m hoping this list will create some controversy of its own. Note, however:

a.) I’ve excluded other Merritt-penned classics by The 6ths, Future Bible Heroes, and Gothic Archies, which was no big thing, as only “San Diego Zoo” was threatening to make the cut, and which also helped narrow my list of contenders down from about 230 to a more manageable 165, give or take.

b.) I have forgone commenting on the songs, whose pleasures are of a piece. Instead, I’ve chosen brief snippets of lyrics (brief enough, I hope, that I have avoided breaking copyright law) that suggest the variety of emotions (i.e. varieties of sadness) these songs evoke, and which will also help you guess the names of the songs, spelled out hangman-style, from which they come. This guessing game is inspired in part by the very fun games in the booklet for the Future Bible Heroes’ Memories of Love, and also by a lyric game my sister and I used to play. Slashes indicate a new word, due to imperfections in Blogger's formatting.

c.) This is nominally a sequel to this, sort of like the way Corn Syrup 2: High Fructose is a sequel to Corn Syrup.


1. I have a mandolin. I play it all night long. It makes me want to kill myself.

_ _ _ , _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


2. Some people don’t believe in dying and some of us don’t believe in life.

_ _ _ _ / _ _ / _ / _ _ _ _ _


3. I don’t know if you’re beautiful because I love you too much.

_ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


4. We used to hold hands at the movie show but we’ll never hold hands again.

_ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _


5. You seemed to be in love with me, which isn’t very realistic.

_ / _ _ _ ’ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _


6. Can you feel my heart in the palm of your hand and do you understand why I can’t stay?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ , / _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


7. I’ve got a sense of perfection and nothing makes much sense at all.

_ _ _ / _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _


8. If I was Paul Bunyan I’d carry you so far away.

_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _


9. Take me to the airport, I need to be extremely far away.

_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ , / _ _ _ _ _ _


10. You know the rain is gone when the sky is full of dust.

_ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _



Submit your answers in the comments. I will post the solution there no later than March 7, 2010.

The Usual Subtexts

My brother-in-law just finished a new album called Earthquake Lake. It’s very good as usual, and while most copies have probably already been handed out to friends and family, for my own amusement I designed an album cover, which looks like this:


This is the fourth album cover I have done (not to mention the dozens that will never be used), and the first done entirely by hand. It is an embellished tracing of a photograph of Deerhunter’s Locket Pundt, a method I have used before (Patrick Wolf on a birthday card; Devendra Banhart on a going-away card; myself on a t-shirt) and which I recommend to non-artists like myself as it tends to produce good results. Because they are always at hand, I often use a set of six earth-toned Faber-Castell pens, and for Earthquake Lake, I believe the colors and the subject matter of the album art suggest the qualities of the album itself. I hope. The original:


Comment on this post if you’d like to hear the music. I will probably make a music video this summer if I can get my camera fixed, but in the meantime check YouTube for others I have directed: “Dull Moment” and “As Far As I Can See”, recorded under the name of my brother-in-law’s former one-man band, The Sugarbeeters.

Speaking of album covers, the best I have seen in a while is the new one by Sade, which recalls those odd Roxy Music covers of yore in a way I didn’t think possible in 2010.




The Magnetic Fields, Realism : Stephin Merritt has never operated without a premise. Racking my brain to think of a normal Merritt project, only a couple Magnetic Fields albums and one or both Future Bible Heroes albums seem like possibilities. Not even certainties! So unless the premise is quantity (69 Love Songs), his premises are always threatening to ruin him. He has escaped unblemished so far, and I think he does again on Realism, but only because half of the songs are pretty wonderful and not because the premise makes any sense.

Realism is presented in part as the flipside to 2008’s Distortion, which in every way but the packaging it is not, and which only goes to undermine Distortion’s startling cover design: the simultaneous cognitive dissonance and consonance caused by a bright pink background, the male restroom symbol, the word ‘distortion’ in a not-quite elegant font. When was the last time you were so shocked without knowing why? What advertising genius, nay artist, thought this up? Barbara Kruger? But in what way Realism’s paper-bag brown, female restroom outline, and quainter font are analogous to Distortion’s iterations, I don’t know. It also doesn’t meet its promise of being a folk album, unless within his definition of folk music Merritt includes all the categories and traditions he has always utilized. None of this matters, of course, except when the songs are so miniaturized, as they often are, that they fail to give the album a shape determined by the quality of the music. But there are wonders too: opener “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind,” with its instantly recognizable Merrittian melody; “I Don’t Know What To Say,” a surprisingly haunting formula song; “Better Things,” the rare moment when Merritt’s greatest quality, sentimentality, wins out over his second greatest, cleverness; “The Dada Polka,” a joke song that works in every way; and of course, the always breathtaking voice of Shirley Simms. These things work on their own terms, but with some future album we might need Merritt to contextualize his ideas in a commentary booklet, just like we would if Quentin Tarantino ever made a bad movie.

Update: There’s not a song on Realism I dislike, but the problem of extreme smallness persists.


Field Music, Measure : This album, maybe because it is so good, only makes me want to repent for not giving Sloan’s Never Hear The End Of It the praise it deserved in 2007. That record, the eighth by Canada’s greatest band (a fact worth noting in these Olympic times) was one of those unprecedented long-form bursts of creativity, experienced by all the band’s members in equal measure, that doesn’t need a unifying concept to distract from its ceaseless onrush of good ideas (think Double Nickels on the Dime). Field Music were good contenders to make such an album. Their previous record, Tones of Town, didn’t have a bad idea in its 32 minutes, and featured a Kinks/Small Faces-style quaint rockingness that seemed due for an expansion. But because Field Music has two songwriters to Sloan’s four, because this is their third album and not their eighth, and because they are more of a “head” band than those power pop Canadians, Measure is not as instantly gratifying as Never Hear The End Of It. Perhaps if you’re a Dave Marsh acolyte you’ll listen to it five times back to back tonight, but I prefer Sloan’s cavalcade of should-be hits. But… more on Measure soon, I hope.

--If I had to handicap my 2010 top ten albums list in this very premature month of February, I would say Owen Pallett’s Heartland will do well, and I have as yet only heard four of its songs! Not only that, but I had never listened to Pallett’s recordings under the name Final Fantasy, expecting labyrinthine string arrangements whose eccentricity would prove too much for me. Alas, Heartland—a place where pop music, string virtuosity, and North American imagery, storytelling and violence meet—features music that I think could be called culture-enriching, and which could well produce a more responsible and liberated generation of artists who are neither purely progressive nor purely traditional. Give this man a Guggenheim! Or are those not given to Canadians?

--Is it wrong to still be loving Basement Jaxx’s “Raindrops” all these months after the parade? Popular music’s transience is no bad thing, and just like the actual raindrops that fell in summer 2009, perhaps “Raindrops” existed to be loved once and never again. But no one has ever put an expiry date upon “My Girls” or “Lisztomania,” and similarly euphoric-at-the-end-of-the-world “Raindrops” is a hotter jam in every way. Here’s hoping we all live to see another summer. I will put it on a mixtape.

--I am such a devotee of the album format that I always prefer to hear a one hit wonder’s one hit in context rather than out, even if the “context” is 40 minutes of filler and tripe. But such cannot be said of A-Ha’s Hunting High & Low, Alphaville’s Forever Young and Modern English’s After The Snow, which are all fabulous albums despite containing hits so awesome (“Take On Me,” “Forever Young,” “I Melt With You”) as to seemingly preclude further awesomeness from whence they came. “Take On Me” is the only one that’s even in competition as the best on its respective album, although it’s the rare moment so heart-tuggingly lovelorn that Morten Harket has to strangle his beautiful voice into a nearly shameful falsetto. But not shameful, because it’s that sort of song.

ITEMS OF GREAT IMPORT

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is a classic lesbian text, I have learned since I began reading it. The fact that it is written in first-person is all you need to know to understand why, I suppose. And it’s hardly surprising anyway, as I can’t name many great American authors, writing in a time when there were still restrictions on what could be written, who can conclusively be said to not have had a non-traditional sexuality. When uncertainty exists, it can make for great literature, potent readings. I’ve been thinking a bit about that, and about the two Russian bachelors, neighbors of our Antonia and our narrator, who live together, and what Cather might be telegraphing, possibly without knowing she’s doing it. But when I’m reading the book, I’m simply swept away, because when you find yourself on the plains of Nebraska and all the details you normally latch onto in fiction disappear, everything that remains takes on such great importance and vividness, especially in this present season that makes me hate the seasons.

THE BRAIN

Roger Ebert once tweeted that he has read all of Ms. Cather’s novels more than once. Ebert is probably the only writer I have read as extensively as he has read Cather. Since I began regularly reading his reviews and watching his old show in 2003, he’s never been out of my mind for more than a week at a time, which is something I can’t say about anyone else excluding my family. This is a fact I can hopefully rely on for a good while longer, but clearly not forever, as a new Esquire profile and Ebert’s own response to the profile suggest. The image that accompanies both, very sad or perhaps just very human, will become iconic, and makes Ebert’s recent articles about pleasures now denied him, like dining and making out, all the more touching. I’ve also been thinking about his original review of 2004’s The Sea Inside, which has stuck with me ever since I read it, particularly the bit about reading tomorrow’s newspaper. When much of what exists in blogland seems so perfunctory, like it was never written at all, Ebert’s online journal suggests a man wandering the corridors of his mind, finding and sharing solid truths.

THE BRAIN

I have nothing but love for most of mankind’s handiworks, and as you may have surmised from my various appraisals on this blog, that also means I love most everything that is mainstream. My tastes align pretty closely with the interests of those who are arts-conscious but not quite arts-critical. Maybe I am such a person, but positively, Lost is one such mainstream thing I love. You may have heard that the show is beginning to answer some of its most burning questions in preparation for its finale, which doesn’t really matter to me so long as it continues to be interesting, which it has been, eminently, this season. Here’s the premise of one episode: A woman holds hostage another woman, now a complete stranger to her, but whose child she raised in an alternate universe. There’s not time enough in the world to think through what this says about the nature of existence, and I doubt the show’s creators have taken the time either, but this is one of those identity puzzles Lost is perpetually setting up that doesn’t have to mean anything because it is just inherently fascinating.

THE BRAIN

I will duel anyone who does not love Shutter Island. I should have said the same about Avatar right after I’d seen it and before the skeptics made themselves known, but I hate to seem like some bozo movie fan who purposely ignores rational argument and relies too much on the word “awesome.” But once it becomes apparent that Shutter Island is a literal thrill ride through the human subconscious, it is awesome indeed, as giddy-making as a chase through John Malkovich’s dimmest memories. If you believe that Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Psycho have not just great endings but crucial endings; if you believe movies don’t do exposition as good as they used to; if you believe that dreams and not reality are the proper setting of fiction; and if you believe that 50 years post-Psycho our greater awareness of mental illness hasn’t made us better people and it’s still impossible to know that what we know is actually so… you will probably love this movie, and I won’t have to duel you. This is Marty’s Solaris, but entirely less ponderous. I fully expected the closing shot to zoom out and reveal Ashcliff surrounded by a roiling alien sea.

I Make No Claims To Certainty

The declaration above is a title that I was going to randomly affix to any forthcoming post, but now it proves more than just generally relevant, as I have been reading…

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin : Franklin, like me, considered certainty, coupled with love of argument, to be an inferior quality in people, to wit: “I wish wellmeaning sensible Men would not lessen their Power of doing Good by a Positive assuming Manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create Opposition, and to defeat every one of those Purposes for which Speech was given us, to wit, giving or receiving Information, or Pleasure.” I have had it easy, as I have always been naturally uncertain of everything I think and do, but I know there are many who have to work hard to cultivate modesty (e.g. the U.S. Senate, whose public chastisement was the best part of Obama’s State of the Union speech). Franklin’s early life and thoughts are filled with other wonders, particularly his youthful flirtation with vegetarianism, for which he is “chid for his singularity.” Anyway, our lesson: anyone who tells you he knows something for sure is due for a major humbling (so it seems to me).

Angels at the Ritz by William Trevor : Trevor is a national treasure. Not ours, but someone’s. There are standouts among these 11 stories, but what is most amazing about them on the whole is the way they begin with dual protagonists and by the end shift toward the point-of-view of one or the other, or some third party, anyone who has the most clear-eyed understanding of what has transpired in the preceding pages.

J.D. Salinger died (or became ultra-reclusive, as someone put it) and I realized I never said much here about Nine Stories, which I read a couple months back. For those only familiar with The Catcher In The Rye, it’s easy to be swayed by the strength of Holden Caulfield’s voice and celebrate Salinger as the voice of a generation before celebrating him as a storyteller. And while Holden is chief among Salinger’s misfits, what Nine Stories makes clear is that, as a writer, he could make you understand the disappointments and modest joys in any American life.

I’ve been perusing the new fiction shelves again, so add these to my list of recent books about characters with various connections to pop music: I Can See Clearly Now, Pop Apocalypse, Putrefaction Live. I might read this last one, about a Navajo heavy metal band.

BLOG BLOWOUT!
EVERYTHING MUST GO!

BRITAIN

To the (not great) extent that I used to categorize the music I liked, there was nothing better than the grand 1990s tradition of lengthy and expensively produced British rock ‘n’ roll albums, “major statements” that stated only this: “Rule Britannia” has never been truer! I include in this tradition What’s The Story Morning Glory, Dog Man Star, Everything Must Go, Drawn To The Deep End, Urban Hymns, The Man Who, and exclude spikier contemporaries like Elastica, The Great Escape, et al. (However: Nothing is so tidy, and there’s a fine line between Liam Gallagher’s hedonism and bro Noel’s Lennon-complex, between “Charmless Man” and “The Universal,” etc. I continue to confuse the issue in the sentences to follow, but the point is that while all these bands had a sense of fun, there is something special and universally appealing about them when they are at their most self-absorbed and -indulgent.)

I'm going to start randomly incorporating
photographs I have taken and/or posed for,
and sometimes iPhoto modified, into my posts.

I don’t think this tradition came to an end (you only have to open an issue of Q to find another pale and misbehaved quintet standing tall and skinny behind their instruments as if no one else has ever been so cool, or perhaps a pale foursome with a humbleness matched only by their earnestness), but with the exception of my love for Doves and Engineers and my awareness of Elbow, I lost track (not so their spikier contemporaries, Maximo Park and the like). Which is why I am so happy to have made acquaintance with just such a band as I parenthetically describe above…

The Horrors, Primary Colours : I don’t know what era this album really belongs to, or on which side of my arbitrary grand/fun divide it lies, but it’s damn exciting, even terrifying at times, in a way I thought exclusive to Primal Scream’s Exterminator. By which I mean: with their funhouse organ and aloof brutality, these songs exist at the Swinging London happening of my dreams, but with an overlay of 80s post-punk jitters, 90s Brit-jam excess, and 00s feedback chiaroscuro that bring them up to the present day. One might find these guys a bit stage managed (another grand tradition) but I’ve decided they’re the real deal, and the British press agrees and feels that this sort of thing is here to stay, still. That’s one constant I can rely on.

Engineers, Three Fact Fader : One smart critic called this something like the hangover to Primary Colours' all-night bender. These guys seem like elder statesmen compared to The Horrors, maybe because it took them four years, not two, to follow up their debut, and because that debut suggested so many possible directions that Three Fact Fader has required them to make a conscious choice about the type of band they want to be. They’ve decided to favor the gently psychedelic, the dreamily grandiose. Even if they’re the last Brits making albums so resplendent, somnolent, orderly and overstuffed, the last ones singing “Rule Britannia,” through the force of their modest ambitions they’re not an anachronism.

SWEDEN

I tell everyone who will listen about how Sweden is a wonderland, maybe in actuality or maybe just in my imagination, or both. This is mostly based on the strength of their arts scenes and something I read about ways that the government there helps ease a person’s transition from male to female or vice versa. I could now regale you with declarations of my love for Ingmar Bergman, and then Lukas Moodyson, Let The Right One In, and the perfection of Sweden’s teen angst. And then I could list my 50+ favorite Swedish bands, but I will limit myself to recent happenings in my continually unfolding mental panorama of Northern paradise.


Frida Hyvonen is not the first person to not rhyme in her lyrics, but she makes an art of it and you might think no one else has ever so thoroughly freed her muse and sang her heart out in prose. She embodies the old cliché about how someone could sound good singing out of a phone book. (Phone books tend not to rhyme.)

The film You The Living, like The Knife’s Silent Shout, is completely unlike anything else that has ever existed, and almost as pitch black, albeit arriving there via washed out pastel greens and pinks. Sweden: the last frontier?


jj’s music, on the other hand, completely meets my expectations of what Swedes do best, and last year’s no 2 is a total knockout, the best thing that happened to me in January (you know, among the things I write about here; original name for this post: “jjanuary”). The album has the sort of globetrotting travelogue vibe that makes Air France so wonderful, but, in the way of these things, is also quite hermetic and best at its most insular and introspective. …I know the ship will still sail on long after I’m gone… This has been called the summer album to forthcoming no 3’s presumed winter, though I don’t think these things are absolute (e.g. a “shivery” guitar can sound “like a summer wind” or “glacial”) and can easily be taken too far. Summery jj has made my favorite winter ’10 music.

MOVIE ROUNDUP

I’ve worked on magazines and newsletters, so my justification for seeing The September Issue was that I find it interesting to see how publications come together. But I took “issue” with everyone at my place of work who suggested that this movie isn’t for everyone, only for fashion-savvy women. Because I saw it for the fashion too, and took special delight in watching these people who ignore everything else that happens in the world, although Grace Coddington, genius of the fashion image, never seems disconnected.

Stanley Tucci is good in The Lovely Bones, as advertised, though I find it a bit disturbing that he has been consistently singled out for awards nominations, his creepy and unredeemed child murderer meant to represent the entire movie. That goes to show what an over-directed muddle of a movie it is. Stanley Tucci can’t feel good about it either. I never want to see a close-up of his fingertips again.


Precious continues to gain power in my imagination, and I’ve begun to think of it, perhaps incorrectly, and only in part, as a feverish and impassioned mash-up movie-movie in the manner of Inglourious Basterds. I watched Two Women, one of the films it directly cites, for this reason, and it’s amazing to think that the big tragedies and bigger emotions that make that film’s ending such a knockout have been reclaimed and given new life in Precious. Director Lee Daniels cites Pedro Almodovar, John Waters, and Julian Schnabel as his influences, and if you look close enough you can probably find pieces of their visions floating around in that weird hybrid of a movie.

I can’t object to anything in the very classy Invictus, except that the final rugby match might have been a bit mishandled. During certain slow motion sequences, I became so hyper-aware of the sound effects editing (men grunting slowly on a soundstage somewhere in Hollywood) that I couldn’t take anything seriously. And I don’t like big rousing sports finales to begin with, except the one in Breaking Away. It’s always weird to remember how movies are pieced together, sound stitched to image, but I don’t blame the filmmakers for my moment of awareness. I just briefly got separated from movieland.

One of the best movies of 2009, The Road comes closer to my understanding and imagining of the source material than any other adaptation I’ve seen does to its original. I never thought the book unfilmable, just that it would require the sort of director who believes in the power of images and who could resist the temptation to narrate. John Hillcoat, of 2006’s great The Proposition, is the man, and the result puts to the test one of Ebert’s most quotable lines: “No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.” The Road is exhilarating, not least because the filmmakers care about our future.

I haven’t seen the original documentary, but the way the HBO retelling of Grey Gardens plays like a standard drama might initially seem inappropriate to the subject matter. In fact, it’s the perfect approach to take: weird as young Edith is, she always believes herself an undiscovered star, and this movie allows her to be the star of her own sordid life story. Drew Barrymore is great as a woman who succeeds in all her failures, while Jessica Lange, as Edith Sr., knows that the story is in fact no great Hollywood drama, and that she’s merely playing a part in Barrymore’s movie. I love that, when a story’s subject justifies what one might consider its shortcomings.

Newsweek published its obligatory piece of Hurt Locker contrarianism, but all it taught me is that the author (a) believes movies that are open to interpretation are inferior to movies with strong, clear messages, and (b) storytellers should have no limitations, and Hollywood directors in particular should be made to apologize for not telling stories completely beyond their understanding of other cultures. This last part ignores the best thing about The Hurt Locker—and here’s a bit of my interpretation, made possible by the smart choices of the filmmakers—the sad, painful admission that it can be dangerous for a soldier to connect on a human level to the innocents whose land he inhabits (i.e. the situation with the young boy).


Other recent movies I’ve liked, and approaches I might have taken in commenting on them: Big Fan (the purity of a certain kind of unthinking partisanship—see Franklin above—and its relation to loving bands); Up The Yangtze (the pitfalls of tourism, actual and cinematic); Lorna’s Silence (sympathy for junkies); Art & Copy (my continued disbelief that any advertising is good, yet simultaneous awe at certain campaigns); D Tour (life’s messiness, tragedy, even within the history of a band I love in a pretty impersonal way).

Twin Peaks: long-form movie, or TV show cut woefully short? It’s a crucial distinction, on which one’s interpretation of the ending depends completely. The simple answer might be that the show’s makers, aware that it would probably be cancelled, tried to have it both ways by imagining a bright future for the show that might grow out of a perfect, cynical ending. In particular, three unresolved plot points can be understood as resolved in these ways (vague spoiler alert!): Benjamin Horn, having lost one daughter, cannot reclaim the one he denied, so it hardly matters what his bleeding head signifies; all those adults, with their absurd teenageresque romances, realize their folly when it becomes clear they have been taking advantage of a woman’s mental illness and delusions of youth; Agent Cooper...sadly, he made the same mistake twice. And while it kills me that the show ends the way it does, it’s also true that it never quite favored good humor over a cold, hard stare into the face of evil.

SONGS OF THE MOMENT
JAM EDITION

--Devon Williams, “Fragile Weapon”
One of our preeminent pop romantics. Within the small part of his small catalog I’ve heard, only “Who Cares About Forever” bests this, which makes me think that his songs’ greatness is directly proportional to their structural intricacy. Prefab Sprout could cover this 25 years ago.

--Engineers, “Sometimes I Realise”
I wasn’t the first to call it a jam, but that’s what it is, a familiar sort of tune whose elements all have different degrees and qualities of buzz, resulting in instant brain fizz.

--Clinic, “Distortions”
The “ballad” on perma-classic Internal Wrangler, this is where Clinic momentarily forget how much they love every outsider musician of the twentieth century and sing one from the heart. I’m glad about how much less this song reminds me of Radiohead than it used to, proof that it has withstood the test of time and of authenticity. But it wasn’t made in a vacuum, and these guys learned something from jazz: the coda is a snatch of double time, I think, not just a quickened pulse, while “Goodnight Georgie” nearly out-sads Vince Guaraldi.

--The Twilight Sad, “And She Would Darken The Memory”
Head up dear the rabbit may die! Anyone who thinks James Graham’s depressiveness outweighs his vitality needs only to listen to the moment he stops singing that line and screams it. (I could revise that Ebert quote: “No good music is depressing, all bad music is depressing.”) Graham has that rare voice that is never disembodied; he sings so deeply you can almost see the chest the words pour out of. Many versions of this song exist, but the album version (with the punchiest drums) is best.

--The Besnard Lakes, “Albatross”
The Lakes want to set your heart racing this time around. Like Wye Oak’s “Tattoo,” this is a different kind of worship music, and the coda, maybe the best of its kind since GBV’s “Don’t Stop Now,” is the moment of oneness.

--Blue Oyster Cult, “True Confessions”
Agents of Fortune is my 70s radio rock album of choice, and this song, so modest compared to the song that follows it (cowbell...), is a true summer jam.

--Gang Gang Dance, “House Jam”
Not my favorite practitioners of everything-at-once quasi-dance music, but this song reveals that all they need is a steady groove and a diva vocal to sort out the culture clutter.

--No Age, “Sleeper Hold”
I think I have underestimated the melodic power of Nouns. When you’ve essentially got a nine-note vocal and a few chords, you have to choose wisely, and this song kills like the best of New Day Rising.

--The Joy Formidable, “The Last Drop”
Jack Rabid is going nuts about this band (the best to emerge in five years, he says). They are indeed the sort of tight post-punk unit (recalling Lush) that I think deserves nothing but admiration, and with enough listens this song might become part of my every waking moment.

--Echo & The Bunnymen, “Stars Are Stars”
If they’d been American, this is the band Ray Manzarek would have been producing in 1980, and there’s a particularly American type of longing and wide-openness in this one.

--Oasis, “Cigarettes & Alcohol”
This is just one of the great boozy and drawled out vocals ever recorded, and the song is such a simple rock ‘n’ roll jam (no great feat for Oasis) that nothing keeps Liam from owning it. I was looking for some akk-shee-un...

--Basement Jaxx, “Always Be There”
A lot of electronic dance music asks you to rearrange your mind like a computer, but the best creates its own headspace, an enchanted land of the interior, that has nothing to do with the technology that made it. Basement Jaxx tap into that pretty effortlessly.

--Iris DeMent, “Our Town”
God, anything to banish this wintry fog and gloom! Even if this song is about the disappointments and regrets of a life lived small, DeMent’s voice is so winning, as some of my readers know, that she never sounds like she’s letting herself feel low about her situation (pluck, I think they call it).