The Best Songs of 2006

9. "Chips Ahoy" by the Hold Steady

The lyrics of this song are exceptional. The only funny thing is that various critics have described Boys and Girls in America as unpretentious and unironic, which I think kind of misses the point. This song is extravagantly overwritten. The whole thing is artifice. It's not Bruce Springsteen, it's a ventriloquist with a Bruce Springsteen dummy on his knee.

8. "Walk in the Park" by Oh No! Oh My!

These guys are way more talented than skilled, more daring than disciplined, but this is a track off a first album so I have to hope they grow into their abilities a little bit. This is a pretty tune. Nothing to really think about. In fact, the attempt to make the lyrics interesting ("Nice day for a drive by shooting," etc., near the end of the song) inadventantly makes the song retarded. It's more badass to unapologetically write a song about pretty weather and talking to cute girls and going on pointless mini-adventures.

7. "The Greatest" by Cat Power

You know that one Richard Avedon photograph of Cat Power that ran in the New Yorker a few years ago? Where her pants are falling down so you can see her pubes, the lit cigarette she's barely holding onto hasn't been ashed for so long it looks like Marge Simpson's hair, and the only thing keeping the old Bob Dylan shirt she's no longer wearing in front of her boobs is bad timing? That just about sums up what's so great about this sloppy, smoky tune. Lyrically, it's a mess but you just want to listen to the sound swell over and over. Her voice is an instrument so beautiful, she should be sitting on Mount Olympus in a toga contemplating turning into a swan or a goat and fucking a mortal.

6. "Parentheses" by the Blow

This song is like futuristic, electronic doo-wop. The sound is deceptively complicated because of all the chirping and whatnot, but it touches purely on classic girl group emotions. It's like the "Locomotion" or "And Then He Kissed Me" meets R2D2. When you're not hating yourself for liking this piece of crap, you'll be trying to not allow your tears to short-out your MacBook every time it comes on.

5. "Like U Crazy" by Mates of State

This song just came out of nowhere. I wasted most of 2006 not even being aware that someone had already written the greatest you're-crazy-but-I-can-fix-you love song of the year--nay, of the oughts, to date! Every time I hear this song I want to sing along. It's so, for lack of a better word, romantic. I haven't told anyone how much I like this song because it's vaguely embarrassing, but I'm owning up to it right now. I listened to this song all afternoon, over and over, and it was by far the best thing I did today.

4. "Punks in the Beerlight" by the Silver Jews

Okay, this song technically came out in October of 2005. But to me, the last two months of 2005 barely count because I happened to be in Europe buying cocoa for a major American chocolate distributor at the time and I met a Swiss girl with hair to her waist who didn't even speak English so I was busy from October to just about oh the end of December having sex in a hayloft. So I have to include this song in 2006's list out of respect, because this song is that fucking good. Just when you thought that Dave Berman's drug addiction was going to ruin everything and the Jews might go the way of the, well, the Jews (circa 1944), everything comes together here. This song is like a philosophy, an apology, a warning, an announcement of the return of a great band. Plus, Malkmus is back on the axe. Just listen to the guitar in this song. It's like a switchblade dressed up as a cookie cutter that suddenly slashes your cheek when you're not looking. Then there are Dave Berman's lyrics. This guy is a bona fide genius. Sorry if that went over everyone's head. I learned that term when I was in Harvard Law School. It just means he's got credentials. Best single lyric of the millenium (to date)? "Ain't you heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews." Because it could mean so many things. And they're all true.

3. "Rough Gem" by the Islands

When I first heard this song, I couldn't understand why all other music has to be so boring, so for a while I listened exclusively to this track. I was happy. But this song's eccentricities are also it's weaknesses. Why are there boring parts in a 3 minute and 36 second song? They should have just made this a minute and a half if the best anyone could come up with was a boring-ass bridge. Still, the amazing melody that makes you feel all bright and cheery like someone just gave you a free Coca Cola is poppy enough to lift this ditty all the way to number three on one of America's most prestigous musical rankings.

2. "Your Blood" by Destroyer

Dan Bejar's lyrics are so far into the realm of annoyingly banal pretentious nonsense that they butt smack up against pure genius. To my taste, they're hit or miss, but when he hits, he hits home runs. This song sounds like what I want my folk rock to sound like: spacious and relaxed with beautifully supple piano and amazing, angular guitar fills. Reminds me of if Dylan stayed young this whole time instead of turning toad and perfected variations of the Blonde on Blonde sound.

1. "Wild Sage" by the Mountain Goats

This is the only song I know that's as well-written as a good short story, maybe a great short story. Everything you need to get you to the top of the mountain and nothing--not a word, note, or flourish--extra. Not the first song off Get Lonely that got my attention, but it became the one that I couldn't forget. John Darnielle's voice is unusually unabrasive here (as opposed to how harsh he can sound on some of the Mountain Goats' earlier lower-fi recordings) probably because of the exquisite, minimal Scott Solter production. (Solter also produced John Vanderslice's well-received but still underrated 2005 masterpiece Pixel Revolt). If you have to pick one song from 2006 to validate Earth's right to exist in some intergalactic court, where the judges are like weird alien frog things, choose this perfect gem from a mature songwriter at the peak of a remarkable career. (If you want more, revisit "This Year" off 2005's the Sunset Tree; it will surprise you with its awesomeness all over again).

Honorable Mention: Sorry there were only nine worthy songs all year. I had to stretch just to get this many. As always, fawning comments welcome, but please first try to wait 30 - 870 minutes so we don't bring down google's servers by all of us doing it at once.

Most Wanted: The Islands

One of my favorite albums in the last few years was Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? by the Unicorns. I’m not going to get into a whole description of why, but it was just a refreshing joy to listen to – a smart, complicated, messy, gleeful, joy. The Unicorns followed up with a disappointing EP. Then they broke up. It was like someone turned the volume, brightness, and contrast of the world down a single notch and a small but significant legion of aesthetes were reasonably and inconsolably bummed to wake up and discover the shabbiness of a slightly dimmer, grimmer world.

Since then, two of the three dudes from the band, Nick Diamonds and Jamie Thompson, joined up to form a new band called the Islands, which also includes members of the Arcade Fire. Tracks reportedly from April’s upcoming CD, Return to the Sea, have been leaking for months, and the first two I came by "Abominable Snow" and "Flesh" were promising but still disappointing and I wasn’t sure how excited I should be for the Islands' new disc. It turns out that "Abominable Snow" and "Flesh" aren’t on the new disc at all – phew! And new, more promising tracks have leaked. After one listen to the stunning, surprising "Rough Gem," I was – to borrow a phrase – coming in my pants, and when I looked around the world was full of wonder again: bright – brighter than ever. I tell you, folks: this disc has vaulted to the uppermost echelon on my list of anticipated things.

What to say about "Rough Gem": When I hear this song, I am happy.

It starts calmly enough with somber strings, but quickly gets kooky and when the high-energy main riff starts – I think it’s synthesizer and some kind of flute – I’m just in a heaven of stimulation. There's an underlying sadness to the song as well, and I can’t wait for the full album’s release in April.

More about the band and full track list of Return to the Sea here. You can find all the tracks mentioned above as well as others with some search engine ingenuity and persistence, but a good place to start is this .mp3 aggregator, Elbo.

Track Review: "Exodus Damage"

I’m pretty into this song “Exodus Damage” by John Vanderslice and, based on its strength, want to listen—and subsequently review—the entire CD, but at the same time, I’m in the middle of a phase where I’m not permitting myself to buy new music—kind of like a fast—so it will have to wait. Instead, I’m focusing this review on the lone track "Exodus Damage" which is available for free download on Vanderslice’s website. I should point out, however, that if I was going to spend money on music, Vanderslice is probably one of the most deserving recipients out there.

Vanderslice is the owner and manager of Tiny Telephone, a recording studio located in San Francisco’s Mission district that has been providing "affordable hi-fi recording to San Francisco's independent music community" since 1997. As a producer, Vanderslice has worked on albums by notables such as Spoon and the Mountain Goats.

"Exodus Damage" is simultaneously a really pretty and somewhat disturbing song, so at the very least it’s interesting to listen to: it makes you think. The production on the album is fairly elaborate. Layers of strange, warbling synthesizer slither behind, over, above and in between the steady strums of an acoustic rhythm guitar. It’s fairly obvious that the practiced hands of a chronic sonic doodler are on the knobs here. Vanderslice seems to love sound itself as well as the instruments that make it and burn it to tape—the more obscure the better. That’s all well and good but what’s really noteworthy about the song are Vanderslice’s voice and lyrics, and his empathy for his narrator’s point of view.

The song is about a young, vulnerable, anti-government, right-winger’s reaction to 9/11. Vanderslice has a bold, emotive voice. You might even say he has a really nice voice. Yet, like many male singers, his is not a particularly strong voice. In fact, the somewhat weak and sharp characteristics it displays seem to suit his character’s vulnerability and confusion. (On an unrelated note, Vanderslice also has a peculiar, subtle accent when he sings, which affects pronunciation, so that "time" is more like "toyme." I don’t know if that's because of where he's from or if that’s just what happens when one sings.)

These are my favorite lyrics in the song, and the ones that I keep coming back to (capitalization—or lack thereof—courtesy of Mr. Vanderslice himself).

so the second plane hit at 9:02
I saw it live on a hotel tv, talking on my cell with you
you said this would happen, and just like that, it did
wrong about the feeling, wrong about the sound
but right to say we would stand down

an hour went by without a fighter in the sky
you said there’s a reason why
so tell me now, I must confess
I’m not sick enough to guess

I like these lyrics because they’re deeply embedded in the point of view of a narrator different enough from me that they’re utterly surprising and yet they smack of a certain, scary authenticity. I don’t mean because America secretly stood down, but rather because 9/11 changed the parameters people use to construct their realities: When the unthinkable is actually possible, the door is open for infinite other threats to take shape, other perversions to fester, other events to come to pass.

There's something deeply unsettling about this (and here I admit to doubting my ability as an essayist to describe why this disturbs me so, but I am trying). It gestures at an instability in the amount of potential in the world, simply because on a mass level the perception of that potential changed.

I interpret the chorus of the song as pointing to this same instability:

dance dance revolution
all we’re gonna get
unless it falls apart

That's our generation. Everything is just going to continue the way it's been going, with us sitting around playing video games and reading about celebrities in People while we pollute the world and squander resources—unless or until something fundamental changes in the American attitude.

Sometimes I’m astonished that when I was born in 1980 it was only 35 years after World War II, a war which always seemed to have occurred in a past as distant as, say, feudalism. I’m serious. But now it’s been 26 years since I was born and that seems like basically yesterday. I read an article the other day about Alan Turing, the British mathematician who broke the naval Enigma code, which changed the course of that war. He and his cryptographer colleagues were stationed in a Victorian estate north of London. When they reported for duty, the locals, unaware of their purpose, promptly began to gripe about "able-bodied men not doing their bit in the war." The British were going to starve to death, and it was just accepted that everyone had to do their part. Now, here we are fighting an unworthy war, but a war nonetheless, and everywhere I look I see able-bodied men and women sitting around, drinking coffee, watching TV, walking dogs, reading the New Yorker and pretending its not happening. We’re so soft here and we grew up believing that we’d never have to fight for our way of life. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t. Then there are those days when the power goes out, or a building falls down, or a bus explodes, and the air crackles with the question.

Timothy McSweeney's Impressive Ambition

The brand-new DVD magazine, Wholphin, is sold bundled with the latest issue of McSweeney’s for $22.00. I reviewed them both separately, in an attempt to come to some general conclusions about Timothy McSweeney’s Publishing Empire or whatever they’re calling it these days.

Wholphin #1

The latest offering from the folks at McSweeney’s is a DVD quarterly called Wholphin, the idea being, I guess, that there is enough quality short video being produced, but not released, that there is a need to collect it and an audience hungry enough for obscure, absurd afterthoughts that it will be consumed. It’s a pretty good idea, too, when you think about it.

The greatest moment in Wholphin isn’t even on the screen; it’s just holding it in your hands. A DVD magazine! It comes in a beautiful white DVD case with a slightly rough texture and there is a small booklet inside. The booklet contains less useful, interesting information than you’d hope or expect, but enough to make skimming it once, at least, worthwhile. Don’t look to it to explain what exactly you’re watching, if you find yourself puzzled by the mystery of a lovely, hypnotic film of a hovercraft crossing a body of water. Don’t expect the booklet to explain who the director or what the title is of every single piece!

It’s not that it’s all downhill from the moment when you're sitting there holding the package in your hands, but it’s safe to say that Wholphin has not lived up to its potential yet. Like a fiction quarterly—except you don’t read it, you watch it—each "issue" contains several short pieces. On Wholphin #1, the pieces range from three to twenty-five minutes in length and run the gamut both in terms of tone and quality. When you put in the DVD, a menu comes up with a movie behind it: a man’s face and beside it, a list of short films you can watch. If you just let it be, as I definitely felt the urge to do, the choices go away, and you’re treated to a short film of a man named Patton Oswalt making faces for about five minutes before the camera follows a janitor down a hall to some kind of storage unit within which David Byrne is playing guitar and singing music—beautifully. Absurd? Yes. Interesting? Yes. Vaguely amusing? Yes. Satisfying? Not really. Too bad we don’t get to see more David Byrne, whose song and performance are the treat. There are two other menus that turn into scenes, both a little better than the first. I don’t want to give away much about them, but you may find yourself watching them more than once as you try to figure out what it is that you’ve seen.

Spike Jonze and David O. Russell are among the biggest names with films on Wholphin #1, and I imagine they will probably be responsible for most of the public interest in Wholphin, such as there is. Spike Jonze’s documentary about Al Gore would have been relevant five years ago. Too bad there was no Wholphin then. I might have cared. The David O. Russell documentary "Soldier’s Pay," about Gulf War soldiers who find a bit of Saddam’s cash horde, is absolutely fascinating, but begs further development—it is cut of solely "talking head" interviews—but the story is so compelling it demands more, reinforcing the viewer’s suspicion that he is watching a collection of the coolest movies that the editors could find—with some throwaway crap from big names included to sell it.

Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that the Miranda July-Miguel Arteta collaboration—too long at just over three minutes—actually is throwaway crap. But it features actors you will recognize and whom you have previously admired, so you don’t wonder why it was included. Someone stroking himself would call it "gemlike" or a "haiku" but a rational person who does not work for McSweeney’s would point out that it is "underdeveloped," and "disappointing."

Carson Mell’s mostly-animated film, “The Writer,” on the other hand, is the funniest on the DVD. It’s a joy to watch and I’ve probably watched it ten times. The filmmaker’s perspective is unique, the pace is fast, and it could not have existed in any other medium. It made me glad that there are people like Carson Mell making movies and that there is such a thing as a DVD magazine—even one with a name as stupid and sure to annoy as Wholphin—to bring them to my living room. I look forward to seeing what’s on issue #2.

http://www.wholphindvd.com/

McSweeney’s #18

There have been occasions in the past where the presentation, the creative packaging, of McSweeney’s has upstaged the content. Style has trumped substance. I don’t deny that some of Eggers’ and the other McSweeney’s editors’ ideas have been good ones. Some of them have been pure, inspired genius: like issue 4 (the first issue I was aware of and one that I still think was brilliant): a box containing fourteen separate booklets; or issue 13, the comics issue, guest-edited by Chris Ware, which was gorgeous; or the one that came with a CD you were supposed to listen to while you read it. But that’s why it’s nice that the most recent issue, #18, is more or less a regular book featuring a sequence of short fiction. It’s nice because it lets a reader focus on the work, not on the packaging.

I have respect and admiration for McSweeney’s—I have to, because Dave Eggers and gang have done it. For better or for worse, ever since it began publishing in 1999, McSweeney’s has mattered as a publication in a way that other editorially-sound literary reviews, say, Tin House, Zoetrope All-Story, and the Paris Review (at least in my lifetime), have not. (Although I admit that this is equivalent to proclaiming that chicken noodle is the most delicious of all of Campbell’s condensed soups or that Luxembourg far outstrips any other Grand Duchy in northwestern continental Europe in terms of economic might—though undeniably true, it’s still not saying much).

But when I stare right in the face of it, the respect and admiration I have for McSweeney’s is respect primarily for a brand, rather than the art that each issue contains or the editorial philosophy that guides it. McSweeney’s is impressive to me primarily as the phenomenon that first capitalized on the obvious need for an independent alternative to mainstream publishing and only secondarily for its content.

When I say that Eggers’ vision as an entrepreneur and publisher is more powerful than his vision as a writer or editor, it’s no slap at his writing or editing: he’s a good enough writer and, as an editor, he’s shown an admirable savvy in choosing to publish, in addition to unknown writers, a mix of known but (at least at the time) underappreciated writers like George Saunders and Jonathan Lethem; but he’s a fucking ninja when it comes to creating and marketing a product that walks the razor line between mainstream profits and the damaged credibility that follows mass acceptance.

As a writer, hell yeah, I’d want to be published in McSweeney’s, because of its (again, relatively) large audience and because publication in its pages bestows at least a passing membership in a community with an attractive hipness. But editorially? Reading this issue, I found it hit-or-miss. I could take it or leave it. But maybe that’s the best that a publication can do.

There’s a bit on the submissions page of McSweeney’s.net that reads as follows:

"We're not concerned about writing degrees or past publications, though, so don't be daunted if you don't have an MFA or much in the way of previously published work."

Yet the pages of McSweeney’s 18 are filled not with the raw, fresh voices of amateurs, as the above might lead you to imagine, but by A) work from the pseudo-professional writers, i.e. MFAs, Michener Fellows, a professor in the writing program at the University of Idaho, the director of the Institute for Humanities at NYU and the like; and B) even worse: second-rate crap from big names like Joyce Carol Oates, Roddy Doyle, and Edmund fucking White. I’m sure the inclusion of Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Bad Habits” had nothing to do with the fact that she’s Joyce Carol Oates! There’s no reason they shouldn’t include professionals if the work is strong, but why say that they don’t care?

That said, there was one story in this issue, "Hot Pink" by Adam Levin, that is everything I would wish a story to be. It absolutely knocked my socks off. Offering an unexpectedly moving variation on the themes (and even language) of The Catcher in the Rye, the story manages to evoke an old favorite while exploring new territory. The story and character are original, surprising, entertaining, sweet, intelligent and funny. There’s a really good feeling I get sometimes when I read a really great story. I got it when I read “Hot Pink.” I wished I’d written it.

www.mcsweeneys.net
Issue 18 at McSweeney’s online store

Review: Syriana

Syriana? Say what? Can anyone tell me what exactly Syriana is, means, or refers to? I'm aware of a country called Syria which does not feature prominently in the film. (Just wondering if this movie could have also been called Lebanoniana, Saudiana Arabiana, or Iraqellany).

I saw Syriana last night at a multiplex in San Francisco’s Japantown. Noting the lax security, I snuck in a small bottle of Jack Daniels. In the darkness of the theater, I spiked my soda with it. After the previews, when the soda was gone, I sunk happily into my seat and slowly sipped the rest of the whisky throughout the 122 minutes of this engrossing and splintered tale of greed, corruption, and betrayal in and surrounding the global oil industry.

Not an Action Movie

Yes, George Clooney plays a guy in the CIA on a mission -- but, no, this is not an action movie. It's far too smart, tough-minded and ambitious. The narrative is woven of loosely connected strands. It has many important characters but no main character. There are a handful self-effacing performances from big stars but no star roles.

With a structure that moves briskly from one storyline to the next, the risk is that one of the plot strands could become more compelling than the others, but the director, Stephen Gaghan, avoids this trap and navigates a complicated story with lean efficiency. The writing, while of a high quality, is broad but not deep. The story is a shallow pool that stretches a hundred miles wide.

Each story takes place along the fringes of a world I could recognize as my own. It’s not America we're watching when we watch Syriana; it’s a shadowy place off to the side where the deals happen that make America possible: in the homes of elite oil barons; the shady backrooms of Washington’s oil lobby; the foreign worker camps of Middle East refineries; the bureaucracy at CIA headquarters. Overall, the movie is successful at evoking a tired and terrible machine hell-bent on preserving its own wealth and power at the expense of anything else. The characters in the movie are the individuals that it crushes.

We'll Always Have Beirut in '84

The movie bravely avoids Hollywood cliché, like having a true hero or a morally clear ending. While I admired the restraint on display here, the movie doesn’t climax but rather reaches a simmer of frustration. When a main character is double-crossed, we expect revenge. Not here. Certain movie baddies always get their comeuppance; not in Syriana. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by too many Die Hard-type movies, but as a viewer I longed for a little taste of the dish best served cold. Characters in the movie refer many times to another character's heroism in Beirut in ’84, but any effective heroic actions are absent from the movie. During a particularly brutal torture scene, I would have given my right nut for a hero. (All kidding aside, Beirut in ’84 is mentioned so many times I really wished we could have seen what happened there).

My favorite thing about the movie was the cinematography. In close-quarters it is lovely without drawing attention to itself. But the movie abounds with breathtaking shots where the camera pulls back to reveal the scale of structures in relation to the characters we are watching: CIA agent Bob in a conversation with an informant becomes Bob standing by a massive sea wall while waves break with all the ocean’s fury against it; or the camera lingers on an endless city of spires above an oil refinery; or we float above the rooftop pool of a hotel in Lebanon.

Special acting props to Amanda Peet and Christopher Plummer who made the most of small, not particularly meaty rolls. But the biggest kudos go to George Clooney who inhabits pudgy, bearded Bob with understated strength and sadness. He also served as executive producer of this very un-Hollywood film.

I would have paid to see this movie.

NOTE: Due to scenes of intense and surprising violence and the near-constant presence of unsettling, widespread corruption reaching the highest levels of government and a lack of anything resembling optimism for the future of the world or even a basic shred of moral decency in a single character, whisky is recommended with this movie.

Coffee Drinkers and Quibble Raisers

Lise and I decided to make a blog where we review stuff because we realized that even though we belong in jobs where we are paid to make end-of-year 'Top 10' lists instead of the regular kind of jobs we actually have, it was never going to happen unless we jumped in head-first and started doing it.

Reviewing stuff isn't something I've ever done in a formal way before, but I like to complain, evaluate, quibble, and rank things, so I think I'm a natural. But just because I'm new, that doesn't mean I'm shying away from the big boys: for my first review I'm setting my sights on the McSweeney's phenomenon with a review of McSweeney's 18 and Wholphin #1, the "DVD Magazine of Unseen Things" which come bundled together for $22.00--Ouch!

I'm also planning a New Year's Eve Eve movie marathon tomorrow and will post notes if I see anything good.

A Hierarchy

Overrated	Properly Valued	Underrated
Prettiness	Efficiency	Beauty
The French Laundry	A deli sandwich	Prison Food
Breathing underwater	Seeing in the dark	Ambidexterity
Phone calls	Email	Old-fashioned letters
The U.S. Dollar	The doughnut	Eyesight
Yesterday	Tomorrow	Now
Monkeys, Pirates, ninjas	Bigfoot, Chuck Norris, Undersea explorers	Greek gods and goddesses, the chupacabra, laborers
Money	Sexual Prowess	Confidence on the Dance Floor