Today

My Bloody Valentine - mbv

Apparently, My Bloody Valentine have released a new album. Yes, that's exactly what I just said. Their last one was 21 years ago. Also, it was a good one. Hell hath frozen over. You can buy it on their website but don't count on it because apparently it totally crashed due to millions of people clamoring for it.

The Smiths Complete

I bought this for myself as a self-Christmas present. Sure, I have been hoodwinked into partaking in capitalist exploitation. How many times can one buy the same music, after all? Some of these albums I first bought when they came out as records. Then I bought them when there were released as CDs. And now I buy them again as "remastered" CDs. I am told that this time, The Smiths Complete contains all the tracks that the Smiths released, remastered by boy-wonder-genius-guitarist Johnny Marr. I have the ears of a deaf mule but even I have to admit that the music sounds wonderful here. Fresh, crystal clear.

As many others have noted, The Smiths Complete is actually incomplete. Yes, the box set includes all the albums released by the band but not every song released by the band. By my count about 30 tracks were never released on the albums and it would have made for a nice extra couple of CDs to round everything out. But that's a small gripe. Here we have pretty much 90% of what the band released in their lifetime and it sounds fantastic.

I will have a longer post about the Smiths later. Yes, I will address the fact that many people find their music insufferably sophomoric, maudlin, childish, immature, self-absorbed, etc. Yet, although I am close to retirement age, I still think they produced one of the most impeccable catalogs of music in the history of modern pop. I would not hesitate to mention them in the same breath as the greatest bands of all time. You would think that their music would date them. But remarkably there is something timeless about the package.

Perhaps my enduring fealty to the Smiths is explained by the fact that I lived and went to school in Manchester in the mid/late-1970s. I was a little boy lost in the grim post-Oil Shock landscape of industrial England. For a while I went to Plymouth Grove Primary School (Junior 3 and 4) and then moved to Central High School for Boys (1st and 2nd Forms) which no longer exists, alas. (Although there is apparently an actual history book about the school). I imagine that at some point somewhere I crossed path with either Johnny or Stephen. Perhaps we shared a bus ride, unbeknownst to each other. I do get a lot of the arcane 1970s-era allusions to Manchester and England in the songs of the Smiths. I know what they're talking about. "The Headmaster Ritual," the opening track to Meat Is Murder, one of the finest opening tracks in rock history, begins with the couplet:

Belligerent ghouls / Run Manchester schools

I couldn't have put it better.



But I don't think that the Manchester connection is really the main thing. Like all bands/music that we hold dear, I think it was the age at which I heard the Smiths for the first time, which was roughly in my late teens/early twenties. Besides the Replacements, I can think of no other band, whose music I processed on such a personal level. Even as youthful angst predisposed me to feel like an outcast, their music slung me into a world where outcasts and uncool people had songs written about them. Of course, with the distance of middle age, I now understand that all teens and young people think that they are impossibly different from everyone else when in fact they're (mostly) just like everyone else. But nevertheless the experience itself was defining.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my (still unfinished) rock'n'roll memoir. It's the one on the Smiths.

 

One of the girls I hung out with a few times that fall [1986], A., was pretty. Some— in fact, many—said she was beautiful. She was not overweight, but everything about her physical appearance made you think round, her lips, her pretty eyes, her hair, her cheeks, her shoulders. There was one particular moment, I remember with her that fall, it might have been the last time I saw her for many months. [My roommate] B. had just bought a car, a blue Toyota or Mazda hatchback. He was driving with A. and myself as passengers—and I had taped The Queen Is Dead on a cassette which we were wearing out listening to; the act of driving and listening to music seemed to elevate our lives beyond the ennui of small town American life. A., who may have been listening to the album for the very first time, wanted to listen to one of the slower songs, “I Know It’s Over.” Her roundness came together in the ‘O’ she made of her mouth: I Know It’s Over. So we played it, as we drove past our apartment, B. unwilling to stop the car since if he did it would leave us in silence, a silence whose uncomfortable imminence was building minute by minute, second by second as the song gathered strength. We followed Morrissey’s voice from one spectacular verse to another, and amazed at where he was taking the song, the song reached a crescendo; we laughed nervously at the ridiculous lyrics, and gosh, how true were they, huh? That’s sort of how that album was, it was ridiculous, but gosh, how true was it, huh? But through it, through the ten songs, the band starts with small premise, and takes the songs to places that seemed unattainable when the songs began.

I would have to say that The Queen Is Dead is one the best albums of all time. On some days, I think it is the best single piece of music released during the rock era. I felt this way in 1986 and my opinion has not changed although I suspect most people who are above 30 would not make such an admission (or indeed believe such a thing) since the Smiths are indelibly linked with the idea of youthful angst, not with the idea of graceful adulthood.

The inside cover of The Queen is Dead shows four young men. The one thing that always struck me was that all four looked self-assured and self-possessed and…adult in that photograph. They didn’t look like weak English boys like the Cure. These guys, especially Morrissey standing right up front, looked totally in control. And the music on that album reflected that feeling. Was this was their response to anybody’s accusations that the Smiths were effeminate or soft or too emotional? The first song lays to waste that motion. Its as if the band deployed an army of guitars and platoon drums, and carpet-bombed it across the musical landscape. One time, maybe about three years later, I had a friend over at my apartment in ___ and we were making dinner. She could take or leave the Smiths. But I spread out my two speakers on opposite corners of the empty living room and put on the title track, the opening track of the album, and turned the volume up. It was like rolling thunder—even then, after listening to it a hundred times, it was like getting a sudden dose of uppers. My friend, for a second, was converted. Johnny Marr, the guitarist uses a wall of fine-tuned amazing subtle guitars that seem to rage, while Morrissey, the singer, grabs hold of the song, and goes where you wouldn’t expect the melody to go. And for all the clichés that we throw at the Smiths about their clichés to self-involved loneliness, Morrissey never took the easy way out with lyrics. In a flurry of words tripped over words tripped over words, chaos comes to live. By the end of the song, the song stops for a second, as if to gather breath, and then runs headlong back into a fantastic vortex with a tremendous drumroll. A minute later the song is over. What a fantastic rush to begin an album.

And that was just the first song. Each song on the album played like a little symphony, a self-contained short story that packed enviable amounts of imagination into it. Those songs are so indelibly linked to 1986 and 1987 that even now, it’s hard to be objective of their beauty and the little moments inserted into songs to elevate the songs from brilliant to breathless. “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” the penultimate song on the album begins on a multiple crashing cascade almost identical to the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” but then takes you into an entirely different world, the mind of an adolescent dismissed by his guardians and fleetingly adopted by a friend. There is a moment in the song after the first verse and after the first chorus, when the song pauses, then lurches back into the second verse, a moment when literally it’s as if the song lifts you up and gently sets you down to revisit the story, a moment that lasts maybe a second, maybe less, but is sublime, in the timbre of a bass note pulled up between the beautiful strums of massed acoustic guitars. Soon Morrissey opines:

And in the darkened underpass / I thought Oh God my chance has come at last
But then a strange fear gripped me / And I just couldn’t ask

These lines are horribly embarrassing on one level, and yet I think every person has suffered through such a moment in their lives.

The album ends with “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” a strange song whose words meant so little to me that they puzzled. Yet the music, the guitars, the melody was another stab of genius. An arpeggio guitar figure of stark beauty built on reverb propels the song literally and methodically into the stratosphere. Over it all, Johnny Marr strikes sharp stray guitar notes randomly during the coda. They feel like little shiny sparks, maybe shards of light, punctuating the shiny surface of a glorious melody. Strange, incandescent, and unbearably melancholy. These songs were so deceptively simple that it is a deceptively meaningless thing to say so. Marr not only played but wrote guitar parts so complex that it’s nearly impossible to figure out. Meanwhile, Morrissey’s genius was to direct the vocal melody to odd places, perched often between notes, uncomfortable.

The Queen is Dead was the original soundtrack for 1986-87, and perhaps I heard it too many times. For many years after, the Smiths became my favorite band, no, not my favorite band, but one of two bands I lived and died for. Other bands were favorite bands, but not the Smiths. In a quest that lasted several years, I tracked down pretty much every song they’d ever released from the most obscure b-sides to rare compilation tracks. I became a music completist, one of the most expensive and ultimately pointless projects of a music fan. I also rediscovered their two previous proper albums (The Smiths and Meat Is Murder) as well as various compilation disks (Hatful of Hollow and Louder Than Bombs). They were all brilliant pieces, especially Meat Is Murder, which is much deeply affecting than anything they’d done or would do, a statement that barely kept your head above water. “The Headmaster Ritual,” the first song off of Meat Is Murder was a song evidently about Morrissey’s experiences in public school in Manchester in the 1970s, an experience that I shared with him. All those lines made perfect sense to me, since I also fucking hated to go play football in the stinking dirty mud on the playfields on dreary rainy afternoons at school in 1977. I hated it. And the more you hated, the more the fucking gym teachers would torture you over it. The same old stodgy bastards. Same old suit since 1962. And can we please stop talking about the bloody fucking Second World War?

Eventually, liking the Smiths became an albatross since many people in our circle in ___ identified me, especially me, with them. Naturally, this opened me up to ridicule for being self-absorbed and self-pitying, a charge that, let’s face it, was pretty much impossible to defend against. Yes, I get it, I’m feeling sorry for myself because no one loves me and I’m ugly and the world sucks and the people I like don’t like me and why should I even bother to get to know anybody because in the end you always get rejected and even if somebody liked me I’d probably still fuck it up and sex is such an alien idea since no one in their right mind would want it with me because I suck and the world sucks and heaven knows I was looking for a job and then I found a job and I’m miserable now. So yeah, people made fun of me. I would have too! Naturally, one of the occasionally repeated charges was the I liked being depressed, that it was an act, an artistic statement, a way of being cool, that I wallowed in it when I was perfectly capable of being normal and cheery and optimistic. Exhibit A was my music. Cue up the Smiths. And you know what, the accusations fueled my snarky negative comments about life and shit which themselves fed my friends’ feeling that it was all an act. Circular. What can I say? Thank you Morrissey and Marr.

Monster Magnet - Medicine

How I'm feeling today:

When Ye Go Away

Second beer. Friday night. Feet hurt. Wish there was third beer at home. Alas, no.

Big Audio Dynamite - E=MC2

I was exposed to a massive amount of music between 1985 and 1990. This song, from 1985, was the soundtrack for many an evening, dancing in the living room in College Station, Texas. I knew every single word. Still do. I loved all the film samples, the cutup techniques, the drum machines, the electronics. Mick Jones was way ahead of his time.




I may be going back to College Station for a visit in April! Excited! Haven't been there in 19 years.

Favorite 19 Albums of 2012

So I (re)listened to a lot of 2012 music the past few days to get some perspective. It wasn't a bad year, but as always, I tend to end up listening to a lot of older music than new music. This is because I am old. But it's also because I don't really have a good way to introduce myself to new music. I pretty much don't trust most of what the blogs and websites say. I mean I have a few favored websites that I do visit fairly regularly but as far as the 'newsmaker' institutions (Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Quietus, Rolling Stone, Billboard, etc.), I find that my tastes have wandered way off from what The Young People listen to these days.

As others have noted probably, truly innovative and good music in the popular music mainstream is a thing of extreme rarity these days. For the past 10 years or so, we have been recycling older musical idioms in new packaging. (This doesn't mean that people are not making innovative music, just that it it no longer ever intrudes upon the mainstream). I suppose that's OK. But what that means is pretty much all music that is supposedly the "best of 2012" sounds like it could have been released 10 (and in some cases 20 or 30) years ago. My list below is like that too. Nothing on it would have been that out of place in 2002, 1992, or even 1982. Move along now. Nothing to see here. There's one major exception to that rule, and that is the album by Alt-J (see my no. 4).

So here are my favorite albums of 2012 (with quick thumbnail reviews since I'm too lazy to really go on about them). The general trend (as you'll see) is pop albums, i.e., stuff that's melodic and short on the one hand; and very noisy aggressive sounds on the other. I don't know what that says about me. I've provided links to my prior writeups on the bands.

19. Wild Nothing - Nocturne: I really liked their earlier album Gemini. Sounds like 1980s British pop but from Virginia. This would not have been out of place on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack or any other John Hughes movie. Pretty indie pop that just kind of washes over and makes you believe (erroneously) for 40 minutes that you might have had a better life a while back.

18. Metric - Synthetica: Seamless introspective electro-pop from from Canada led by Emily Haynes. Perhaps you've heard "Help I'm Alive" from their past album. Or the new song "Breathing Underwater" which was one of the best pure pop songs of the year, in my book, harking back again to the 1980s. It could have been a hit in 1986, for sure.

17. Grizzly Bear - Shields: One imagines a group of very talented, intelligent, and well-read people (who read the New York Times) working self-consciously to produce 'clever' music. Grizzly Bear has been doing this sort of thing for many years now but with the new album, they don't seem to be afraid of letting some emotion show through all the intricate arrangements. The emotions break through particularly well when they perform, as in this clip "Half Gate" from Shields. Unlike 'clever' pop musicians from the past (like XTC, for example), Grizzly Bear can be enjoyed without realizing how complicated everything is. Really great stuff.

16. Four Tet - Pink: This is basically a compilation of sorts, collecting a bunch of singles released this year by Kieran Hebden. It's really hard to describe his work, barring some very vague suggestion that it's electronic music. For a few years now, he's been putting out strange yet alluring albums that build on keyboard-based melodies over frenetic drumming. It sounds 'organic' yet off-kilter. (I would recommend both Rounds and Everything Ecstatic). Here, he moves more toward the club world. The melodies are still beautiful but the loops are made for the experimentally-inclined dance party.

15. Pinback - Information Retrieved: This came out and dropped out of sight. It was Pinback's first album in five years, which is a long time in the scheme of things. I'm still a fan (a massive fan) of their early albums (Blue Screen Life from 2001 and Summer in Abaddon from 2004) but the last album (Autumn of the Seraphs, 2007) was a bit underwhelming. I've written gushingly about them before so I won't repeat that stuff, but their m.o. is really the perfect 3 minute guitar-based indie pop song, immaculately produced and delivered. The new album doesn't deviate from that format much although there's less variety. Somebody put together an amazing video of probably the best song off the new album ("Glide") interspersed with images from from the 1965 French documentary Pour un Maillot Jaune about the Tour de France.

14. The xx - Coexist: This is the "difficult" second album. It's actually very much in the vein of the first but a bit more quiet and downtempo if that's even possible. So pretty much everything I've written about them before still applies except that if I said before that this was music made for 3 AM, now it's more like music made for 3:30 AM. Key lyric of first song: ".... being as in love with you as I am..." A quiet 37 minutes to recover from a party before you finally succumb and close your eyes.

13. Tame Impala - Lonerism: They are from Australia. Led by a guy named Kevin Parker, the band basically does late 1960s-era psychedelic pop. A bit like early Traffic or early Pink Floyd with some late period Flaming Lips thrown in, this is ostensibly an album about being alone. But don't let the retro affectations fool you, this is really a worthy update to psychedelic rock, along the lines of what (I think) Flaming Lips or Primal Scream or even the Chemical Brothers were trying to get at with their '90s albums. Rich and lush.

12. Cloud Nothings - Attack On Memory: This is one of the handful of very aggressive rock albums on my list. If you're hearing them for the first time, it's safe to say that you'll think of Nirvana. They do indeed sound at times (or evoke at times) aggressive guitar rock rooted in minor chords. What's different is that Cloud Nothings, led by one Dylan Baldi, has a bit more versatility with props to the Velvet Underground and krautrock. In fact, the album's centerpiece, "Wasted Days," sounds a bit like a minimalist merger of Nirvana and VU jamming for 9 minutes. In places here and there it sounds young, in a way that suggests Baldi searching around a bit, but I think this restlessness will pay off bigtime in the future.

11. Japandroids - Celebration Rock: Another throwback rock record about being young. I wrote before about how they write songs about youth slipping away. It's not necessarily something I relate to (since youth has long ago slipped away for me) but the high octane energy is infectious. This is anthemic rock'n'roll, a little bit like 1970s-era Springsteen on steroids. I guarantee that the fantastic melodic hooks of every one of the eight songs on this album will make a permanent home in your brain by the time the album is over. Standout track here is "Younger Us," a great lost track that could have been on the Replacements' Tim.

10. Ty Segall Band - Slaughterhouse: Ty Segall is a guy from California in his mid-20s who puts out like three albums every year. This is aggressive guitar-based rock'n'roll whose goal is to rock your brains out. I think I read a review somewhere that it bears similarities to the Stooges' Fun House. Certainly there are some overlaps: they're both incredibly heavy and loud, but Ty Segall is not necessarily interested in the apocalypse (like Iggy was); instead he wants you to sing along. His vocal style is actually a lot like late 1960s bands--lots of harmony and drama. The best way to describe this is that it's a bastard combination of the Stooges, Black Sabbath, and late 1960s pop if that makes any sense. It's a welcome record in a time when it seems people have forgotten their guitars and are (still!) unable to give up the controls to their autotune gizmos. Standout tracks: "I Bought My Eyes," "Wave Goodbye" (live) and  "Death."

9. Spiritualized - Sweet Heart Sweet Light: I could on and on and on about Spiritualized but what's the point? You either like them or you don't. By this time, nearly two decades into the Spiritualized phase of his career, J Spaceman (aka Jason Pierce) has three basic musical approaches: the songs about love-lost sung in a hapless/pathetic puppy voice; the songs about Jesus and light and angels that sound like mega-church choirs; and the songs about heroin/drugs/Jesus that veer between VU-grounded rock'n'roll and 10 minute long skronk blasts. You know the drill. The new album has a bit of all that although the focus here is on melody and song construction. Seems Pierce wanted to do more of a conventional pop album than anything else. Representative pop track here: the beautiful "Too Late."

8. Orbital - Wonky: Forgotten by hipsters, Orbital (basically the two brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll) 'reactivated' after a long break and came out with a new album this year. I really didn't know what to expect but was greatly surprised at how good it was. As with almost all of their music, the melodies are simple and gorgeous. Even as they lift up your mood into a celebration of life, there's a hint of melancholia in all of it. And you can dance to all of it. I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I say that this is the best Orbital album since 1996's In Sides, one of the greatest (in my mind) albums of that decade. Read my entry about Orbital from earlier this year, and take a trip through "One Big Moment" (the opening track on Wonky) played live at Royal Albert Hall earlier this year (2012).

7. Chromatics - Kill For Love: Another throwback to the 1980s, Chromatics put out this longish album (an hour-and-a-half!) this year that doesn't outlast its welcome. They were definitely trying to capture the vibe of 1984 and if you listen hard enough on headphones, they have fake "record scratchy noises" throughout the album. Pretty much every song on this album would not be out of place in the mainstream Top 40 although the subject matter does veer into darker (or at least maudlin) waters. Most have probably heard the awesome cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" (which they re-title simply "Into the Black") but there are many more electro-pop gems on this album. You can't go wrong with the title track. They also had a song last year that was featured on the movie Drive ("Tick of the Clock") although it's not on this album. My brief writeup here.

6. Bat For Lashes - The Haunted Man: I've been listening to this a lot on my iPod. A very winter album yet warm and inviting. She (Natasha Khan) is one of the most talented singers around now, but it's not just her vocal delivery but her self-assured sense of what she wants out her music as a total package. For sure, she has a bit of Kate Bush in her--especially her aesthetic vision of music as a total experience--but also some Annie Lennox and perhaps Siouxsie Sioux; this simply fantastic album displays all of that. In fact, this is one of the most emotionally resonant albums I've heard in a long time, one that is not about being smart or ironic or obtuse. "Laura", a solo piano song, is the obvious standout vocal tracks here, but "All Your Gold" underscores her Top 40 aspirations very clearly. She's also something of an enigmatic but elusive star in Britain. Interviews with her here and here.

5. Dead Can Dance - Anastasis: Another band that has "come back" after years and years of being in limbo is the duo of Dead Can Dance. Anastasis is a bit like their late nineties period albums but with (slightly) more concise songs. It's amazing how well-preserved their voices still sound (both Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard are in their early fifties). They are still exploring all sorts of genres and idioms and ages and eras but they are not quite as willing to let go of the ground these days, so their songs tend to come from an older more reflective place. I saw them earlier this year in New York and it was one of the best shows of the year for me. Key tracks here are "Children of the Sun" and "Return of the She-King." My previous writeup on them here.

4. Alt-J - An Awesome Wave: This is probably the only album on my entire list that actually doesn't sound like something familiar from another decade. This is a thoroughly original album that takes from its influences but builds to make a startlingly wonderful pop album. It's not something you'll hear once and think magnificent (the lead singer's voice particularly is an acquired taste); instead, it rewards repeated listenings. An Awesome Wave is only the debut album by this British band but they already show mastery of multiple musical strands: you will find here scraps of pure folk, electronic music, hints of jazz, Top 40 pop, hip hop, trip hop, 1970s pop, indie rock, etc. etc. all packaged in strange tunes full of odd twists and turns. None of the songs really begin and end where you expect them to. This is the most original pop album of the year bar none. Check out the videos of the standout tracks "Tessellate" and "Fitzpleasure."

3. Lotus Plaza - Spooky Action At A Distance: Harking back to late 1980s indie pop, this is the dreamiest and prettiest album of the year. The architect behind Lotus Plaza is Lockett Pundt, whose main job is to play guitar for the band Deerhunter. So this is more like a side project, but it is a worthy side project, nearly as good as anything Deerhunter has ever done. The album has lots of reverb and echo and guitars playing minimal melodies that transcend up to some heavenly place. You close your eyes and drift away. If there was one album that was the soundtrack for my 2012, this was probably it. You can probably guess that I drifted in and out of reality a lot this year, important given that my work commute (through Harlem and into the Bronx) often necessitated a disconnect from my surroundings. Not sure if any of that made any sense. My previous writing on Lotus Plaza here and here. Standout tracks from Spooky Action At A Distance were "Strangers" and my absolute favorite "Remember Our Days."

2. Swans - The Seer: Ah, we finally get to the heavy stuff. Well, what to say about this new mangled horrifying creation of the Swans? This nearly 2 hour epic of noise, endurance, and catharsis? I saw the band this fall in New York and it was one of the most intense experiences I have ever had in a live setting. The sound was bone-crushing loud and martial. There seemed not a single note out of place as Michael Gira (pronounced jeera) led the band through the ups and downs of his mini epics. Even all the way back in the early 1980s when Gira began the Swans, the backbone of his aesthetic was one of submission-through-repetition, i.e., the idea that two or three notes repeated endless at bone-crushing volumes will eventually make you submit to the beauty of noise. Now, about 30 years later, the music is a lot more polished and planned and executed with clockwork precision (and yes, more melodic) but it has no less the effect. One thing about the The Seer: although the album is technically quite long, it actually doesn't feel tired. There's a lot going on here in terms of the dynamics of a band cruising through the limits of its abilities, wringing sound and fury out of its instruments. Yes, it will make you feel exhausted at the end, but in entirely a good way. There are genuine moments of tenderness amid sonic epics, real melodies that weave in and out, drawing your attention to the beauty of sound. Well worth the investment. I have written about Swans many times over the years on this blog, for example here and here. Standout tracks on this album include "Mother of the World" and "Avatar." There is also an interesting mini-documentary about the 2012 tour of this newest incarnation of the band, worth watching here.

1. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!: Wow, what an album! I know, that's not exactly a review that says much. Well, the last album Godspeed put out was a long time ago, maybe 10 years ago, and it was fine but except for a song or two  it isn't something I go back and listen to that much. But this album, which seemingly came out of nowhere is perfect on every count. The album itself is structured around two lengthy instrumental pieces (about 20 minutes long) connected by two shorter (6 minute) pieces of drone music. The two longer tracks are actually older pieces the band played on their previous tour in 2003 but now have finally recorded as studio pieces. They sound sonically amazing, the first building into an epic army of guitars and the second, a loud but melodic instrumental piece that is almost redemptive. Unlike, say Swans, who often inhabit that fine line between ugly and beauty, Godspeed is at a fundamental level hopeful and about the future. The vinyl, packaged wonderfully as usual, comes with some oblique messages of support for the Occupy movement but is never at a polemical level. They invite the listener, through the music, to find spaces of hope. And you know, you don't have to even be political: the power of Godspeed (or at least, good Godspeed) is to connect with very personal struggles (loneliness, for example). Music for the beaten down, music for the empowered. It's all here. My previous posts on Godspeed are here and here. The first track off the new album is still being streamed here.

Best TV of 2012

Another topic I know not much about, but I'm gonna throw my hat into the ring. Here are my favorite TV shows of the past year. Much has been written in the past few years about how the locus of good writing has moved from cinema to television, and this I cannot disagree with. The quality of TV in the past ten years has been pretty incredible. Critics seem to date it to The Sopranos and then The Wire (for pay cable) and Lost (for network TV) but I have not seen any of those shows. For me, the first indication that TV might be amazing was Six Feet Under which ran from 2001 to 2005 on HBO. Of course, I didn't watch it when it originally aired but caught up on DVD sometime in its twilight years, but what a ride that was. And unlike 90% of TV, it ended on the highest possible note with a hugely emotional but not saccharine series finale.

My favorite shows of the past year were:

10. The Walking Dead (AMC, Season 3, Part 1): OK, stop right here. Let me be clear right up front: Season 2, which aired in 2011-2012 was execrable, just hideous, one of the worst imaginable runs of television created in recent memory. There was nothing redeeming about it. So the bar was set extremely low when Season 3 began in October of this year. And it wasn't half bad. In fact, it was actually pretty good and I looked forward to the show every week. In many important ways, the TV show has clearly diverged from its source novel, The Walking Dead graphic novel series (which began in 2003 and has gone 105+ issues so far). For starters, the TV version is not quite as dark or nihilistic. But without that darkness, the creators of the TV show resorted to blathering navel-gazing for much of Season 2. Thankfully, they finally chucked all the existential bullshit and went for taut action-filled episodes with lots of plot movement. And the results have been surprisingly good. Or maybe because the bar had been set so low that I'm willing to cut the show some slack. Hard to tell. But I will be watching when the final episodes of Season 3 air early next year.

9. Spartacus: Vengeance (Starz, Season 2): Let me be clear once again: We do not look to Spartacus as the erudite sequel to I, Claudius or some other upper crust British TV serial. No, we look to it for gratuitous nudity, sex, and violence. Who knew that violence could be so artfully displayed in slow motion CGI? The slo mo trajectory of splattered blood is a thing of beauty, or so it seems. That being said, the writers of the show know how to tell a compelling story of betrayal, betrayal, and much more betrayal. What is loyalty, after all, if it can never be betrayed? Liam McIntyre has replaced the late Andy Whitfield, but since I was never attached to Whitfield's portrayal, it didn't make much difference to me. We all know how this story ends, but it's hard to avert our eyes away from the glorious debauchery of this series.

8. 30 Rock (NBC, Season 6): How can this show still be funny? I don't know. I only have the following clip:



7. Parks and Recreation (NBC, Season 4): Parks and Recreation was always the mirror image of The Office. Both enjoy the conceit that they are basically documentaries about work. But where The Office was a show about intra-office dysfunction in the private sector, P and R focused on the public sector, and this makes the show a biting critique about the slow collapse of public funding and support in small town America. But really, that's beside the point. You don't have to give a shit about politics to see the funny here. The irony (or the genius, if you will) of the show is that the principal ideological conscience of the show is one Ron Swanson, who is basically to the right of Ayn Rand in the economic conservatism spectrum. Ron Swanson is also the funniest sitcom character since Col. Henry Blake on M.A.S.H.

6. Boardwalk Empire (HBO, Season 2): A slow burner of a show but definitely worth the investment. This is America in the post-Great War period--a show in the grand tradition of Irwin Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man, one of the first and greatest TV min-series', broadcast in the 1970s. Every episode of Boardwalk Empire was pretty much a shocker and none no more than the Season 2 finale in which one of the central characters meets a bloody end. One wonders whether life on coastal New Jersey in the early 1920s was really this violent, but that's not really the point. Powerful people have always equated justice with violence, and often conflated the two. When you add greed into it--it was the Prohibition era after all--you get characters who were literally building Henry Luce's "American Century" with their bare hands (and sometimes with guns and crowbars).

5. Downton Abbey (PBS, Series 2): Julian Fellowes, of Gosford Park fame, continues to maintain the high level of Season 1 as the series moved on into the tail end of the Great War and into 1920. I had this momentary idea that the producers of Boardwalk Empire (see my no. 6) and Downton Abbey would do a crossover season, since they're both around 1920, but alas that was too much to hope for. Historical fiction can be done extremely poorly because presentiment always colors any kind of plot. (Teleology for all you historians.) In Downton Abbey, you know of course, that the Great War was awful and you know that it will end some day (1919, to be precise) but Fellowes manages to transcend these "historical moments" to illuminate the daily lives of the rich and the poor and those in between. Regardless of our station in life, we all love and hurt, apparently. No, but seriously, this is an extremely well-written show about the English upper class and their servants that is neither gratuitous nor boring. Sure, it skirts being a soap opera but that's not a bad thing here. Can't wait for Season 3.

4. The Colbert Report (Comedy Central): Stephen Colbert continues to be a comedic genius. I don't even know how to write anything meaningful about him. He has created a meta universe. I find it both funny and incredibly scary that Wikipedia has entries not only on Stephen Colbert (the real person) but also an entirely separate page for Stephen Colbert (the character).

3. Game of Thrones (HBO, Season 2): A bit like Lord of the Rings in its ambition to create an entire fictional universe, Game of Thrones (the TV show) continues to maintain its superlative standards. It's not just the high production values, but that the characters are all fleshed out, the acting is generally superb, and the pacing is never lacking. (Take note: Walking Dead, another TV show drawn from the written word). The second season upped the ante significantly with several parallel stories, some that explicitly intersect and some (the whole narrative with Jon Snow as part of the Night's Watch as they venture beyond the Wall) that don't. But for me, the joy of watching Game of Thrones is less about the political intrigues and shifting alliances (which in itself are fascinating) than really, to see..... just what happens next! And that, I think is really the best reason to watch anything on TV. For those who are still on the fence about Game of Thrones because it's "fantasy," yes, it is! Think of it as high political intrigue---a game of royal chess---invested with emotion at the very smallest, personal levels, with the occasional detour into "Where are my dragons???!!"

2. Mad Men (AMC, Season 5): I was one of those who thought Season 3 and 4 of Mad Men didn't measure up to the halcyon heights of the first two seasons. But Season 5, the one that they showed in 2012, was unbelievable. It may have been the best season of the show so far. Every episode of this show is written like a mini movie, something so artful that you forget you're watching a TV show. One of the defining aspects of the show has always been how the writers balance the 'real' history of the 1960s with what they show every episode. We know, after all, all the obvious cliched touchstones of the mid-1960s, but where hack writers would have invoked every single 1960s milestone in heavy-handed tones, Mad Men writers have expertly negotiated this minefield in subtle and unexpected ways. The 'real' 1960s was like any other decade, intensely personal struggles amid immense changes. And as the show reminds us, the dirty secret of the 1960s was that the 1950s survived for a very long time well into the 1960s. Don Draper is an (im)perfect epitomy of that. We know the 'future' is coming, and the premonition of that was shown artfully in the following clip from the episode "Lady Lazarus," one of the best of an incredible season. I have never ever heard a Beatles song in any TV show or movie so it was every bit as jarring as one might expect (and expensive):



1. Breaking Bad (AMC, Season 5, Part 1): This was over the top brilliant. One of my favorite TV shows of all time, for sure. The first 8 episodes of Season 5 set up the denouement of the entire series, as Walter White, our erstwhile protagonist, moved ever so slow further and further into the dark recesses of the human condition. Where he began the series as a befuddled middle-aged man incapable of asserting himself in even the most banal of circumstances, we see now a man who defines his own morality, one who is willing to kill to maintain what he sees as his tenuous sense of order. I think that's been one of my favorite aspects of the show, the evolution of a central character on a TV show from its moral center to one who is unmoored from any sense of conventional moral obligations. He will do anything to preserve his life. The question, it seems, for the remaining episodes of the series (to air in the summer of 2013) is how that will affect his family, his wife, his son, and his sometime associate Jesse Pinkman. Undoubtedly, one or some of them will not make it out of the show alive, but the question is not who, but how. This show is like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment brought down to disposable pop culture levels; soon we will see how our New Mexico-based Raskolnikov will fare in this minefield of blurred moral choices.

Remembering Joe

Who died 10 years ago this week.

Top 10 Movies of 2012

OK, year-end lists and all that. Since I tend to spend a lot of time listening to music and a lot less time watching TV and/or movies, my lists for TV/movies will be very limited and uninformed. Nevertheless, it's still fun to revisit what I liked this year.

So movies first. This is my weak spot as I haven't basically seen much of what people saw or liked this year. But the following movies (in reverse order) resonated:

10. Trishna (Michael Winterbottom): A grim adaptation of Pride and Prejudice Tess of the d'Urbervilles set in modern India, starring Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed.
8. Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik): A violent meditation on how economics and $$ are the foundations of the American spirit.
8. The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb): A surprising re-invention of Spiderman, one that's actually much closer to the comic book than the lackluster and strangely lifeless movies that came out a while back.
7. Jeff, Who Lives At Home (Jay & Mark Duplass): A funny but touching movie about... well, about a lot of things covered under the veneer of hapless comedy.
6. Cloud Atlas (Lana & Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer): An ambitious (if a bit flawed) movie about the value of freedom from tyranny, set in different times and different places.
5. The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard): An incredibly smart meta commentary on the horror film genre even as it tells a completely entertaining tale.
4. The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan): Beautifully filmed movie that shows the dangers of quasi fascism even as it critiques the Occupy movement.
3. Argo (Ben Affleck): A perfectly paced thriller with the added bonus that much of it is based on actual events.
2. Marvel's The Avengers (Joss Whedon): One of the best superhero movies ever made. It's a perfect blend of action, overarching plot, witticisms, lean script, and emotional investment.
1. Prometheus (Ridley Scott): Pretty much a home run as far as a movie was concerned, and I have no reservations in putting it first on the list. Granted, I'm a bit of a sci-fi geek but the movie managed to pack together a tight-action packed movie that added to the "Aliens" canon and hinted towards some big "what is life"-type questions." It was also visually beautiful, a total cine classic, lush, rich, a whole universal experience, in both senses of the word. It obviously drew a lot of aesthetics and tone from Stanley Kubrick, particularly (but not just) 2001: A Space Odyssey, but upped the ante with the mood of Alien and a bit of the ass-kicking of Aliens.

Michael Fassbender's "David" is a perfect update of HAL:



Now, there are a bunch of movies I have not seen that came out this year which I want to see, which deserve some mention (in alphabetical order);

1. Anna Karenina (Joe Wright): I loved Atonement, and the conceit of this adaptation, that it's a theatrical production within the movie, sounds intriguing.
2. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies): Postwar England, Rachel Weisz, ex-RAF pilots, stiff upper lips, and forbidden love--what's not to like?
3. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino): Probably won't top the awesomeness of Inglorious Basterds but few movies could. But Christoph Waltz is in it!
4. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson): I'm cautious but excited. I loved the book as a kid. And as a friend pointed out recently, Martin Freeman is more hobbitish than... pretty much real hobbits.
5. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev): Have to see this.
6. Looper (Rian Johnson): Sci-fi with JGL looking a bit like the badass from Inception.
7. Robot & Frank (Jake Schreier): Recommended to me as one of the better (the best?) portrayals of robots on screen.
8. The Sessions (Ben Lewin): This will be sad.
9. Skyfall (Sam Mendes): Bond apparently feels patriotic.
10. Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold): It has Kaya Scodelario from Skins. She potentially has a great career ahead of her.