2007 reviewed

Instead of some "10 Best" list, which I hate, here are a few concluding reviews and arguments. The theme to all of this is, "Christ, I'm a fucking cliche."

Favorite Album: I'm Not There Soundtrack

This is an album of cover songs. The Byrds and Hendrix showed that Dylan was meant to be covered. This album is better than The Byrds and Hendrix. It is the best collection of Dylan covers ever.

It's a testament that you can hear a song for literally the five-hundredth time and the experience is as thrilling as it was sophomore year of high school when Highway 61 played on tapes played in friends' basements. Special highlights include the Sonic Youth cover of the title track, the Richie Havens cover of "Tombstone Blues" and the Cat Power cover of "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," a Jack Johnson (!) cover of "Mama You've Been On My Mind," The Hold Steady covering "Can You Please Crawl Out My Window" (they take an obscure song, add some "Positively 4th Street," and it still sounds like they cooked it on their own.) Aside from fairly unimaginative tracks from Stephen Malkmus and Calexico (which aren't bad, just easy) the entire album is stunning.

This soundtrack and Dylan's Chronicles memoir make it clearer than ever that Dylan is America's gift to 20th century culture. Someday, Faulkner and Louis Armstrong will be the territory of specialists (they probably are already) but every generation will rediscover Dylan and adopt him.

The Album to Love Most After 10 Listens: The New Pornographers, Challengers

Skim the ebullience from their three preceding albums, and the product is starker and simpler, a kind of musical hug, Simon & Garfunkel's harmonizing without the treacle. It took awhile to sink in. The first few times I felt empty-handed, but once the expectations readjusted, it seemed clear that this is the Pornographers' best, most rewarding album, even if it's not the rowdiest.

The Album that Couldn't Be Loved: Wilco, Sky Blue Sky

It's a glass of room-temperature water that sat on the bedstand all night. It's a plate of scrambled eggs that's too undercooked and too close to room temperature. Tepid, bland, and unmemorable. That's okay, though. Good artists get to fail, and when they do, it reminds you of the parts you like about them so much in the first place.

Elder Statesman Who Hit His Peak: Bruce Springsteen, Magic

I get it, and the enthusiasm hasn't weakened as the weeks pass by. This was a very good album. Maturity has its privileges.

The 2006 Album that I Found in 2007, When it Proceeded to Monopolize my iPod: The Thermals, The Body, the Blood, the Machine

It's the violence and fright of Children of Men set to music, and made angrier. This album fucks you up. It's got the rage of Rage Against the Machine made catchier. So I like it. Technically it shouldn't count because it came out in 2006, but I found it this year and I get to set the rules. The album is something about teenage rebellion against an imagined Christian-fascist state, and a certain numbness that goes away as our protagonists flee.

I also found out that I really like the Cold War Kids, even though their album was 2006 as well. The band name was an initial turn-off, I think.

Second-Favorite Concert of 2007: Wilco, Hammerstein Ballroom

From Kyle Dean Reinford's photostream.

Even Sky Blue Sky sounded good when they played it live. What I wrote then:

[T]here's sometimes this sense of smugness in the band's product, that Jeff Tweedy, while not tweedy, kind of thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. It's almost like he overthinks. He never lets loose with the kind of passion you hear in Neil's "Powderfinger," or in "Like a Rolling Stone" or in "Sway." The blue, you see, is sky blue, never subterranean-homesick or tangled up. Sometimes precision is a shame.

The caution of this band's albums -- as good as they are -- doesn't show when it plays live. They know how to guide a crowd, and the undercurrent of stately adornment fades. So "Heavy Metal Drummer" feels like more of a celebration, and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" is just a kick-ass song, and the blue tangles up just enough to position passion ahead of perfection.

Favorite Concert of 2007: Arcade Fire, Radio City Music Hall

From TammyLo's photostream.

I'm not into handicapping shit like this, but after seeing Arcade Fire at Radio City and Randall's Island, I think they're going to be as big as U2 in a few years. They can own a massive space. They sing serious songs but remain accessible. I liked Neon Bible (Jeff, we disagree) but never felt much for the band until I saw them live. The Radio City show had moments of anarchy and chaos -- Win Butler openly encouraging people to defy security and rush the stage, projectiles flying through the whole show, pyrotechnics and a screaming crowd, in a spectacular venue that usually doesn't see such antics. It was everything a show is supposed to be. If this sounds gimmicky or stage-managed, it wasn't.

2007 was a year of great live shows. There wasn't a single show where I shuffled my feet, glanced at my watch, and wanted the encore to wrap so that I could head home. Highlights included The New Pornographers at Irving Plaza, Spoon at Bowery Ballroom and Neil Young at United Palace. Only The White Stripes show at the Garden left a little to be desired, but it hardly qualified as a low point.

Favorite Book of 2007: Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

But then sometimes the hype is right, and this was one of those times. There was a huge, ambitious book, with big themes and plots, and in the final pages a series of payoffs that made the whole exercise worth it. There was no slight of hand or gimmickry. This is the best big novel in the past 10 or 15 years -- more coherent and disciplined than Underworld, and up there with American Pastoral, Atonement and Never Let Me Go as the greatest piece of accessible literary fiction published in my adult lifetime. (How heavily qualified was that?)

I must have re-read the book's strange opening passage about four times before I really dug in. It started back in September, when I bought the book in Ann Arbor and then went to Ashley's to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and read the first sixty pages. I closed the book and put it aside -- great stuff, and I was not prepared. Along the way, I read Johnson's Jesus' Son and pecked at The Name of the World, both of which are fine but not in the same class as Tree of Smoke. When I revisited the book in December, I cut through its 614 pages in about 96 hours, taking notes and drawing lines between names and dates in the book's end pages, holding the book close to my eyes and doing my best to track every character and element in smudged, penciled-in notes.

It's war fiction. It's about mythology -- Buddhism, Catholicism, Confucianism and local practices in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It is about underground tunnels and obsessions. Like all post-Classical war stories, it is about corruption and our heroes' ruin. It is deeper, bolder, more expansive than Johnson's claustrophobic drug horrors in Jesus' Son.

Denis Johnson is a helluva writer. His sentences are rich and vivid but never intrude. I can't recall a book with better prose. You, the reader, are never turned off by a feeling that he is trying too hard to dazzle. The book is loaded with paragraphs as good as this one:

Through the doorway of a tavern -- a couple of sad-drunk infantrymen dancing in the jukebox glow, each alone, chins down, fingers popping, shoulders working, heads bobbing, trudging like carriage horses toward some solitary destiny. She stopped to watch them. In the songs on jukeboxes or on radios tuned to AFVN she often heard God calling out to her -- "Love me with all your heart" -- "This guy's in love with you" -- "All you need is love" -- but tonight the voice sang only to soldiers, and its message didn't reach the street.

Tree of Smoke, p. 309. If there's another book with such great language, show me the way.

The Two Books that Idiot Critics Underrated: Exit Ghost and Falling Man

It's fun to tear down idols. I get it. Philip Roth got away with Everyman so it was time to pull out the knives. He started the book by talking about prostates and most of you couldn't overcome that. So you shut down, got lazy, and barely bothered to read the rest. Your loss.

The Falling Man response was much shoddier, because somehow you couldn't get it out of your feeble little minds that the guy didn't throw in a bunch of clever know-it-all tricks. He wrote a straightforward story. He nailed it. Eerie, funny, sad, scary, smart and credible -- probably the best thing that he's written since White Noise.

Least satisfying book of 2007: The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

It was fine, but it's now about Exhibit G of the CrimeNotes Thesis: With the exception of Zadie Smith or Mark Z. Danielewski, overpraising young writers screws both the writers and their readers, leaving you feeling empty when a novel is merely good and not a masterpiece, thus leaving you the reader unnecessarily wary of buying future books because the critics set the stage for a let-down when it didn't need to be that way. See also J.S. Foer, Marisha Pessl, Nell Freudenberger, Benjamin Kunkel.

Unless they've written the new V. (actually written V., not something merely decent that makes the reviewer pine for V.) a rave review for a first novel should be no more enthusiastic than: "This is a strong debut that shows much promise. The young novelist did some things well, and if the book was uneven, it was less uneven than most."

This is fine. F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel pretty sucked; Junot Diaz's first novel is better than This Side of Paradise. Let him be.

Book that changed my fucking life in 2007: The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein

A very scary book that begins with CIA experiments in brainwashing, then charts the rise of neo-liberal economics at the University of Chicago, following how psychological warfare in Latin America led to radical economic restructuring at the behest of American corporate interests and intellectuals who treated nations as their petri dishes for radical theories.

The Shock Doctrine is a secret history of geopolitics since World War II. Klein's principal leap -- that sensory-deprivation techniques used on an individual level translate into entire nations traumatized by coups and turmoil -- isn't quite persuasive. She just didn't have the social science to back this up her major thesis. But this is a less damning criticism than it should be. Her account of the bonds between radicals in academia, government and corporations is the real revelation, thoroughly persuasive, and more frightening than any conspiracy theory Oliver Stone conjured. Think tanks ad faculties make for unlikely villains, and then she turns to Chile.

Plus, the book has a fucking trailer produced by Alfonso Cuaron:

Best movie of 2007: No Country for Old Men

Actually, this is the only new release I saw in 2007, so it's the only eligible entry. Going to movies in New York sucks. It's like hanging out in an airport -- tons of lines, confusion at ticket kiosks, frustrated patrons, too much advance planning, and passive-aggressive seat jockeying. I hate it. If you spontaneously decide to go to a movie on a Sunday afternoon, God help you, sir.

As to the movie itself -- pretty good. Great work by Javier Bardem and Kelly MacDonald, every other performance is credible, it's engrossing throughout, the photography was good even if the geography made it easy, and then you get to the end and it all felt a little empty. I love the Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy and therefore expected one of the greatest things of my life. It asn't as good as Fargo, Blood Simple, Barton Fink or Miller's Crossing, but better than anything they've done in 10 years. (I don't understand the Big Lebowski cult.)

I also saw Knocked Up on-demand and judge it the most overrated movie of 2007. There was one funny scene involving a bouncer. That was it. It was a comedy for pro-life frat boys who support Mike Huckabee and desperate single girls who want babies. I told someone this and got yelled at, and was duly informed that not all Democrats want abortions.

Whatever. If Seth Rogan's character knocked up Giselle, she would've made a quick run to the clinic. Giselle had that baby because she wanted Tom Brady's genes, and now he's trapped. We live in a cynical world -- the Tom Bradys and CrimeNoteses of the world could auction their semen at Sotheby's, but Seth Rogan would be stuck with crackwhores. In real life, the chick in that movie never would have carried the baby of a fat loser Canadian with no viable income, and none of us would have held that against her. 40-Year-Old Virgin: brilliant. Knocked Up: unfunny, right-wing fantasy for losers.

The New Pornographers, Now Starring Dan Bejar

Found on Galenh's photostream.

They've always been a better studio band than live band. The live performance traditionally have been perfectly adequate, with good moments but a ramshackle feel. They've felt makeshift, like everyone was winging it, sometimes a half-step off, with Carl Newman running the show and everybody else trying to keep up.

Something has happened. At Webster Hall last night, they performed as a great live band, for the first time in the five shows that I've attended. They were backed by a cellist, a violinist, a flute and accordion. Neko asserted herself as a bigger stage presence. They sounded perfect, fuller and deeper than the albums -- a development that stands in contrast to old performances, where it almost felt like they were a cover band trying to cover their own studio albums. Not anymore. The Pornographers, it's great to see, are now a live band, not a loose collective that puts out superb albums and occasionally tours.

It was somehow even better than that, though. Challengers seems to have baffled some fans, with the band sounding less like an Edison Lighthouse/Mungo Jerry hybrid, going for more mellow and even-paced. As an album, though, it's their most complete and successful output. There aren't the rousing pace-setters like "Sing Me Spanish Techno" or "Letter From and Occupant," but there's also nothing to skip -- no "Bones of an Idol," which sounds terrible crammed between "Twin Cinema" and "Use It." Challengers was a creative leap, and a complete success, and the performance of its songs was kind of moving.

There was no other word to describe Neko Case, Carl Newman and Dan Bejar, together on stage, lined up evenly at the front of the stage, triple headlining, when they sang "Adventures in Solitude," a beautiful song, a far cry from Pornographers classics like "Slow Descent Into Alcoholism," but so pure and pristine.

Balancing on
One wounded wing
Circling the edge
Of the neverending
The best of the vanished marvels have gathered inside your door

More than begin
But less than forget
But spirits born
From the not-happened-yet
Gathering there
To pay off a debt brought back from the wars

We thought we lost you
We thought we lost you
We thought we lost you
Welcome back

The three of them harmonizing on the refrain, singing to a silent room, was a moving thing. You hear those lines and it's like they were singing to each other. It's the height of geekdom to watch Neko, Newman and Bejar and think of something like The Last Waltz, and how amazing it was that there was a time when Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson and Bob Dylan routinely shared stages together. The analogy is imperfect, but there's this thrill of the glamorous Neko, Newman the likable frat boy, and the nervous disheveled Bejar, who've now done very well for themselves outside of this supergroup side-project, assembling something magical that they've never approximated in past shows. It was the kind of show where you wished you could thank them afterward.

I'd be curious to know the Carl Newman-Dan Bejar creative process. Bejar's own band, Destroyer, has a cult following among critics and music nerds. Destroyer's Rubies was much loved and wildly praised. Bejar's Destroyer tells its stories in incredibly elaborate, interlaced songs and lyrics, but Bejar's output is never so accessible or lighthearted as it is when he's with the Pornographers. On Challengers, Bejar has his best Pornographers product in a song called "Myriad Harbor." "Myriad Harbor" starts with a guitar that sounds both restless and impish, almost smartassed. And then its lyrics kick in, a kind of running dialog that Bejar has with himself as he wanders New York:

Bejar: I took a plane, I took a train.
Newman/Case/Bejar: Ah, who cares you always end up in the city.
Bejar: I said to Carl, look up for once.
Newman/Case/Bejar: See just how the suns sets in the sky.

It's about wandering and restlessness, but being comfortable in your own skin at once, hitting the peak with the line, "All I ever wanted help with was you." "Myriad Harbor" has all the Bejar landmarks, the phrasings and the great bouncing falsetto, as if someone had taken Frank O'Hara's poems, Blood on the Tracks and a dash of Tiny Tim, added a bottle of Corona, and cobbled together an artist.

It would go too far to say that Bejar stole the show. He wanders in and out of songs, never looking at the audience as he sulks across stage to take his spot at the microphone, appearing disheveled and out-of-place next to glamorous Neko and All-Canadian Carl, and then pow! his song starts and the beer is down. Whether they made more use of Bejar last night than they had in the past is tough to say, but he sort of stole the show.

And I think that he steals Challengers. Neko and Newman owned past Pornographers album, but the best stuff here is all Bejar.

This is why I'd love to know the process between Bejar and Newman, both of whom sound better when they're collaborating than they do working individually. Bejar is more accessible and joyful when he has Newman's influence; Newman is less sugary. And you think a little about what people said about John Lennon and Paul McCartney, that The Beatles magic worked because Lennon tempered McCartney's pop and McCartney countered Lennon's seriousness. You get the feeling that as Bejar and Neko become more prominent in their own rights, that economics and schedules are going to make the Pornographes an infeasible proposition -- when they sing, "We almost lost you. Welcome back." you wonder whether it was written from Newman to Bejar, and you hope that they keep working together.

Springsteen: heresy/conversion

I always thought that Bruce Springsteen must be pretty good. People whose taste I respect love him. My sentimental favorites like Bob Seger and Tom Petty emulated him; everybody says that The Hold Steady sounds like him, though I don't hear it.

He's original, universally loved, never "sold out," is outspoken on politics when it matters, and genuinely appears to care about his craft and his fans.

It seemed like it would be nice to like him. I've turned down offers for free tickets to his shows, thinking that someone more enthusiastic should get them. His music just didn't connect with me. I've managed to maintain a 20-year fondness for acts like John Mellencamp, Seger and Petty, all of them Springsteen knock-offs in some way, without more than a twinkle of enthusiasm for Bruce.

Timing is behind some of it. In the 90s, when my musical tastes expanded to the point where I began to hold aggressive opinions, he had two radio hits, "Secret Garden" (figuring prominently in Jerry McGuire) and "The Streets of Philadelphia" (featured in the Tom Hanks weeper). Once a guy's musical output becomes mentally linked to Renee Zelwiger and an AIDS-afflicted Tom Hanks, it's tough to recover. Plus, these whispery songs sound more like outtakes from Carol King's "Tapestry" than visionary rocksmanship.

After September 11, he released an album called "The Rising." It's a record that means a lot to some people. Clearly, it came from the heart -- he wasn't exploiting or cashing in. Quite the opposite. This was a product of sincerity, written by someone who felt strong convictions and human sympathy. There's that saying about poetry and sincerity, though. Divorced from the historical moment (which may be impossible to do) it hit me as a creative failure. Subjected to it a few times, I heard a pompous, lumbering, jagged mess, in a category with movies like The Life of David Gale, where an earnest effort to depict serious issues fails from the start and gets worse as it goes along. If I were to list the worst works by major artists in any genre, "The Rising" would be there. After that, I avoided his Pete Seeger album, not based on any strong aversion, but because Jeff Tweedy and Billy Bragg did something roughly similar a few years before him, and it was tough to imagine Springsteen topping that.

Still, this isn't a matter of dislike. It's a blind spot more than hostility. The famous opening seconds of "Born to Run," to my ear, sound like a mix of elevator music and children's band recital. This is a matter of taste but also makes me an idiot, I know. Some of the lyrics are just awful: Meat Loaf, expecting to be taken seriously.

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims
And strap your hands across my engines
Together we could break this trap
Well run till we drop, baby well never go back
Will you walk with me out on the wire
`cause baby Im just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta find out how it feels
I want to know if love is wild, girl I want to know if love is real

It's ungrounded sentimentality, a male soap opera pumped up on testosterone and longing. Is Springsteen a more influential and original artist than John Mellencamp and Bob Seger? Yes, most definitely. But I hear "Jack and Diane" or "Mainstreet" and the songs are about things I recognize. Bob Seger's blue collar stories were about ascent and resilience; Springsteen's were more about avoiding suffocation. In Springsteen I recognize -- well, I'm not exactly sure what, but it's something like a guy you knew in high school who just broke up with his girlfriend, got severely wasted, and sits in the back seat yelling out words while the classic rock station plays in the background. Even his quieter output, like "The Ghost of Tom Joad," approximates an undisciplined emotional gush.

It's not all dead to me. Portions of "Thunder Road" are pretty wonderful ("Show a little faith, there's magic in the night/ You ain't a beauty, but hey you're all right"), I still like "Going Down" the way I did when I was a little kid, and "Glory Days" is good drinking music.

This criticism leads to one conclusion: Bruce Springsteen's "Magic" is an excellent album.

It's everything I've wanted to like about Springsteen without the parts that killed the mood. There are still his weak spots that bug me: the seemingly endless refrains of dull phrases ("I'll work for your love dear") and a rotten opening line ("Pour me a drink Theresa in one of those glasses you dust off") but in "I'll Work for Your Love" they're redeemed in a bleak love story with frightening Biblical allusions. "Radio Nowhere" sounds like it could have been backed by Crazy Horse, and what could have been another retread about the homogeny of commercial radio is saved by clever poetic lyrics (I was spinning 'round a dead dial / Just another lost number in a file / Dancin' down a dark hole / Just searchin' for a world with some soul): catch the reference to "Dancing in the Dark"? He alludes to "Mystery Train" later.

"Girls in Their Summer Clothes" is another big success, nostalgic and romantic. It's open to interpretation, but it sounds like the reflections of a guy past his prime, walking through a town where he has a long personal history, swept up by the voyeurism and escapism of the younger "girls in their summer clothes" who "pass me by." It's sad and beautiful at once, like that part of "Thunder Road" that I admire.

There are at least two references to burning cities (in "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" and "Last to Die") and there's "Devil's Arcade," set in the Iraq War. The album doesn't cross into the overtly political, though. As an album, "Magic" has a natural counterpart in Neil Young's visionary 2003 release "Greendale," a long story-album about loss of community post-9/11 that smartly chose never to raise the topic directly. Neil's "Greendale" had a sense of a pastoral America that was slipping away and couldn't be regained, and in "Magic," Springsteen has his dreamy, burned-out towns, which he haunts with the specter of war and violence without directly imposing them. "Magic" is subtler than "Greendale," much more accessible, and he doesn't take his eye off the ball.

"Magic" somehow manages to create an almost-flawless blend of the personal and the political. It never becomes as overtly preachy and riled as the eponymous song in "Born in the U.S.A." He's created something more mature and nuanced than that.

Most artists don't get better with age: too much nostalgia was a curse to Neil's "Prairie Wind," but somehow Springsteen's "Magic" harnesses it perfectly. For the first time in his music, I know what he's talking about without relating to the experience. There are a lot of reasons to be enthusiastic.

What's in their wallets?

It's almost impossible to bring up the fact that you've noticed a song by a band you like in a TV commercial without sounding as if you're trying to stake out territory as the most punk rockest by casting accusations of sellout. My roommate did this months ago while we watched an ad set to "The Bleeding Heart Show" by the New Pornographers. Although he's a self-confessed music snob, and prone to fits of anger at TV's excesses, he remained calm and resigned. Nevertheless, he seemed disappointed, but he probably wasn't. And that was before I speculated that perhaps the cost of living in Canada City is skyrocketing, and if selling one's work to a tacky online college is what it takes to keep that nice apartment on Maple Leaf Street just off Canadia Boulevard, then so be it.

And that's the natural impulse. You see a familiar song in an unfamiliar context, one that represents an intrusion into your life and you are stopped short. It happened to me the other day, seeing a 60-second spot featuring Shaun White, his floppy, coppery coiffure, and various assorted outdoor-hipsterian hangers on. White and his fellow extreme-sports enthusiasts bopped about the world with ease, thanks to his rewards-earning credit card, which allowed them to follow the whims of nature from powedery Alps to the swelling Pacific. All of this was set to a vocals-free "10 a.m Automatic" by The Black Keys (who are, not to put too fine a point on it, the second-greatest phenomeon to come out of Akron, Ohio).

I pointed the song's origin out to my co-blogger the other night as we awaited the start of Game 6 (and Akron's first-greatest phenomenon). Naturally, he immediately thought I was accusing them of selling out. I wasn't, but even so I struggled to not sound accusatory, as if my experience of that song is somehow diminished because they cashed a check in exchange for having produced an evocative and enjoyable piece of work. Because advertising is such a resented force in our lives (Question: do you think the heads of ad agency's have DVRs?), I think we have a strong, negative gut reaction to seeing a favorite song being used to hawk goods and services.



So how do I feel about my favorite bands "selling out"? Well, it's not their fault that advertising sucks. And much like I rationalized to myself shortly after picking myself up off the floor when I saw a Nissan ad set to The Cardigans' "Lovefool": Hey, tuition at Malmö University can't be cheap. good for them. I hope they enjoy the cash in good health.

And besides, it's tacky to admit this, I know, but maybe I wouldn't have ever come across and liked "Rhapsody in Blue" if not for all those United commercials on during football games when I was a kid. And that's an all-time favorite of mine.

I know, I know, but I can't stand Woody Allen movies.

Personal notes

Dear Wilco: I didn't understand you until A Ghost Is Born, which reminded me of Neil Young in his Arc and Weld stage. So how the hell did Sky Blue Sky turn out so boring? Whenever I try to listen to it, I fall asleep. Watching Chinatown does the same thing to me, so maybe you're in good company. Please try harder next time.

Dear Hold Steady: Thank you for the EP that you just released on iTunes. It was a nice surprise, even if the only new track is a cover of Bob Seger's "Against the Wind." I recently stumbled across an mp3 of "For Boston," and feel lucky that I did. True, almost everything you do is crazy fun, but how did the horrible "Chillout Tent" make Boys and Girls in America while "Girls Like Status" and "For Boston" couldn't cut it?

Dear Besnard Lakes: You and I shouldn't like each other at all, but for some reason it's a match.

Dear Amy Winehouse: Occasionally good albums get to be popular, and I'm glad that you've pulled it off. I saw you on Letterman just before the album came out, was instantly smitten, and hunted down every song I could find. You're still keeping me happy and interested. Thanks for that.

Dear Arcade Fire: I find your albums boring and overwrought, but God damn, your reputation as live performers is well earned. The show at Radio City last week, it felt like a privilege to be in that room. I was in a good mood for the next few days just because of you. You may become my next U2: even when they annoy me, their lives shows are indispensable. It was an extraordinary night.

To The Band: The box set for The Last Waltz was worth the price. You're a band that I always turn back to, and I'm glad that we found each other when I was in college.

To The Sopranos: I don't predict you or overanalyze you. I let the experience wash over me. However, it occurred to me that the animating force of this show is that Tony was raised by a woman who tried to murder him, and the pity and horror of seeing Tony kill a man who he thought of as a son brought the series full circle. He is no better than Livia. Also, while I'm writing, I'd like to note that the Slate guys who write about you are first-rate fucktards.

Dear Gary Shteyngart: I avoided reading Absurdistan because its title (wacky!) sounded like a Jimmy Fallon skit and the premise sounded Boratian. Yeah, I'm an idiot sometimes. I haven't had so much fun with a book since A Confederacy of Dunces, and in its first half, it kept occurring to me that you're the John Kennedy Toole who lived. Thanks for being so fun, dude.

Dear Richard Yates: I know you're dead so you might not be reading this, but Revolutionary Road has its great moments, even if it lost me at the end. Very glad to have read it, but it will just make me angry when the movie comes out.

Dear Michael Chabon: True, I'm just 120 pages into The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and true, it's just started to pick up, and true, it's not fair for me to say something mean before I finish the book. But the first 100 pages are rough. Real rough. In the past you could be annoying, but never so boring, and I'm worried about what's going on with you.

Dear Ian McEwan: I hated Saturday, and I hated it oh so very much, but it might be the kind of hatred that only a genius inspires. You know Atonement is my favorite book this century so far, but it took me awhile to forgive you for Saturday. I got around to reading Amsterdam and was happy to see it pull off a great little puzzle and get the tragicomic tone just right. Let's forget Saturday. It's all good now, even if the New Yorker excerpt made me nervous about On Chesil Beach.

Dear Amsterdam: Looking forward to seeing you again this weekend.

Best to all,

CN

All kinds of time

Things I can do in less time than it takes to listen to the entire first movement of Bach's Violin Concerto No. 2 (recording by Hilary Hahn, resident hottie of the international fiddlin' set):

• Make an omelette out of locally produced eggs and goat cheese
• Do my taxes (federal only).
• Update my fantasy baseball rosters
• Write a short, pointless blog post

Things I can not do in that time span:

• Relay the account of a 2007 Cole Slaw Blog Tournament of Everything semifinal
• Write a long, pointless blog post.

Clearly, if I had chosen "Stranglehold" by Ted Nugent, I'd have been able to do all of this (but not the New York State return. Because man, that thing sucks.)

No, dumbass, I will not play "Devil Went Down to Georgia" for you.

Year-end review

Roaringest Radical Resurgance

Living With War, by Neil Young. It was a sledgehammer protest album released at the key moment in the zeitgeist, an anti-Bush, anti-war wolf whistle that happened to rock hard. Neil's dreary 2005 release "Prairie Wind" sounded like the twilight of a great artist content to fade away. In its ragged glory, "Living With War" showed an angry legend rage against the dying of the light. It brought his career, politics, and music full circle.

And for those who considered it too blunt: fuck subtlety. Sometimes, metaphor can sound like an apology. This was Neil's year to thrash.

Best Reason to Go to Minor League Ballparks

Because they're Bob Dylan's summer tour venues of choice. As I wrote at the time, there's something irreplaceable about "watching him in an infield the size of Webster Hall, looking up during 'It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding,' and seeing the Big Dipper overhead."

Best Show that Has Zero Gimmicks But Nails it Completely

Friday Night Lights.

If you don't love this show, we have less in common than I thought.

Best Show that Nobody Watched

Sons & Daughters on ABC was the heir to Arrested Development. The show died an early death, and now all I have are episodes saved on Tivo that I watch once a month and refuse to delete.

Best Show Ever

The Thick of It on BBC America. Angry bureaucrats who want to kill each other shout expletives behind closed doors. Sabotage and betrayal are ways of life. In these respects, it depicts the workplace more authentically than either version of The Office.

Best Movie that Nobody Wanted to See

United 93. Not to kill the mood or anything, but in addition to being a damn fine piece of filmmaking, it was a major cultural moment to see the events of that day depicted without kitsch or sloganeering or sentimentality. Less exploitative than anything you'll see on network news or the History Channel. Makes you want to be a better person and an angrier person and to care deeply about things. It is superb and grueling and indispensible.

Best Novel of 2006

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. At some point in junior high I started reading Stephen King. Ever since, I've been waiting for a book that kept me up until 3 a.m., leaving me with nightmares, causing me to wake the next day feeling bleak and tired and just a little bit scared. The Road did that, and then left me reeling for entirely different reasons. It's a book about the end of the world, as cross-bred with The Old Man and the Sea, As I Lay Dying, and The Plague. Man against nature? Check. Questions about civilization? Yes. Poignant depiction of a father and son? Yes. That, and starvation and cannibalism, mercy and cruelty, and a landscape so deftly described that I believed it in full.

It freaked out my inner thirteen-year-old and then gave me one of my best reading workouts since college.

Best Novel of 2006 That I Didn't Want to Read

The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud. A book with a terrible title, a plot that sounds like a weak Jay McInerney imitation, written with too many adverbs and adjectives, about people that are intensely unlikeable. But like Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, Claire Messud's novel draws a panorama of ambitious writers, thinkers, socialites and businessmen, letting their clashing agendas and egos leisurely burn themselves out in a series of social gatherings and romantic indiscretions. Powell's characters became a part of the world with World War II, and Messud uses 9/11 to similar effect. Her portrayal of September 11 isn't totally persuasive, but it's serviceable, which is better than any other novelist has so far mustered.

Best Novel of 2006 That Was Cruelly Overrated, Thus Setting Up the Writer to Be Later Condemned as a Disappointment

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. Sometimes talented young writers publish good first novels. Anxious for hope in the future of literature, critics and readers hype the book's quality beyond reason. Rather than being lauded as talented authors with potential, the young writers instead are compared to Pynchon and Nabokov and Salinger. They publish subsequent novels, which are received as disappointments and cannibalized. The young writers never had a prayer.

This year's victim was Marisha Pessl, who gave us a perfectly entertaining and thoughtful novel that overexcitable critics have tried to ruin through overpraise. Nabokov? Not even close. An ambitious mixed success written by a likeable and promising voice? Yes, and that's good enough.

Best Working Band Since the Stones Released Sticky Fingers

The Hold Steady burned itself so deep into my brain that on a recent night stumbling out of a bar, I blurted lyrics ad naseum and continued sputtering them for blocks.

Sure, I think that their fall release Boys and Girls in America fell just a tad below the standards that the band set in Separation Sunday and Almost Killed Me, but it still creates a lyrical epic of lost love, moments of clarity and all the flashpoints where everything simultaneously goes so right, so wrong, and so drunk. Over three albums, they've assembled a singular and persuasive cast of characters and drawn a roadmap to the United States -- comparable to Bob giving us Desolation Row, the story of Highway 61, and Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

Best Description of The Hold Steady by a More Objective Observer

Courtesy of Jeff Weiss:

The Hold Steady are a cult. Like Scientology. Or Kaballah. Or Cory Kennedy (No Vincent Gallo). Except that they don't want your money, your time, or your ability to make Cobrasnake's site traffic spike. They just want you to have a good time. That's all. They offer everything you could want. Boozy anthems for the frat-boys, introspective lyrics for the ladies, relateable tales for the teens, literary leanings for the book dorks and enough substance abuse references to satisfy Mel Gibson. Boys and Girls is the Hold Steady's best album yet, a complex and articulate collection of 11 short stories of growing up in America. Inspired by a Kerouac quote about "boys and girls in America having such a sad time together," they too will live on like the deceased novelist. People will always need things to make them a little less sad.

Best Excuses for Going Hoarse

Photo taken from GRW's photostream.

The Hold Steady's 2006 shows at Warsaw and Irving Plaza.

I think you're old enough to know that if you're lucky, once in a decade you'll experience a show where the performers and the crowd are synchronized, and your arms go sore and your voice gives, and there's a flash of intensity and comeraderie usually limited to a stadium at the moment of your team's biggest triumph. This year we got two of these.

In summary, I consider this band enjoyable.

Best Reasons Not to Throw in the Towel

Ohio: For once, not ruining the country.

Senators-elect Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Sherrod Brown, Claire McCaskill and John Tester.

Never happy with New York's two senators, for the last few years I've thought of Barbara Boxer and Patrick Leahy as my own two. But in addition to restoring my faith in the Republic, this fall brought a crop of tough, no-nonsense, populist progressives to the U.S. Senate. Any one of them alone would be enough to celebrate.

Sure, some may turn out to be disappointments, but for the first time in my adult life, candidates that I love won.

Three More People You Should Try to Meet in Heaven* (2006 ed.)

Ann Richards, Bo Schembechler and Gerald Ford.

*Secular atheist version.

Best Unexpected Side-Effect of Attending the Michigan-Vandy Game

Accompanying a five-month-old baby to her first college football game. Because there's nothing like watching LaMarr Woodley flatten some prissy Southern- awwwwwww...


If you've never experienced it, going to a game with 110,000 of your best friends and enjoying four hours of pageantry and ass-kicking is a pretty visceral experience, and - awwwwwwww...

Best Use of Numbers

Michigan 47, Notre Dame 21.

Worst Unexpected Side-Effect of Whupping Notre Dame

Getting so drunk that you believe you're in Ann Arbor even though you're in a bar on Second Avenue. Hectoring friends about how you want to go hang out in a dorm that nobody liked in the first place, and then licking their faces when they decline.

Waking up the next day surprised that you managed to walk home without getting in a fight or getting arrested.

Best Sports Photo of 2006

Best Way to Work Through the Pain of Losing to Ohio State

Hold a ladies' arm-wrestling tournament in the kitchen.

Best Bar For Getting Mooned by Ass-Chicks

Loreley.

Blog-Related Honors

Best post by Flop that No One but Me Liked: Fun with mascots

High-Concept Posting Series that Failed: Excitable Young New Yorker. I entertained myself, but confused and/or pissed off the rest of you. A pompous, vulgar, needy, self-absorbed, moderately racist, clumsy, overemotional twentysomething? Yeah, I guess she wasn't as far-fetched as I thought. Sorry for the confusion.

Anticipated Fanboy Political Crush of 2007: Al Gore.

Mea Culpa: Duke Lacrosse. Yeah, I was pretty wrong. I guess I should have learned by now always to assume the worst of people in power. Is it possible that I should be even more cynical?

Most Surprisingly Successful Experiment with Live-Blogging: Hoot!

Best Trend in Late-Night Noisemaking

Hooting. Elegant in its simplicity, a little rooftop hooting cleans the soul. With a beer in hand, look up at surrounding towers and unloose a long, steady, "Hoot!"

Awesome.

Best Trend in Late-Night Aggression

Tie: head-butting; face-licking.

Second place: headlock.

Third place: punching in the forearm.

Best Excuse to Hold an Impromptu College Reunion

Turning 30.

For an immature asshole, I get to have a lot of friends.