Brian Kellow Interview (2012)

Something I’ve said more than once over the years is that the three biggest influences on me among writers are Pauline Kael, Bill James, and Greil Marcus. I consider myself lucky to have had some contact with two of them. I interviewed Marcus back when I first started writing, and he later contributed a few comments to my old fanzine; the past couple of years I’ve submitted the occasional question to the “Hey Bill” section of James’s website, and he’s responded to most of them. Something I often regret, though, is that I never sent any of my writing to Pauline Kael. I’ve primarily written about music the past 25 years, but I wish I’d sent her a piece I wrote about the best uses of pop music in Scorsese’s films--an idea that I bet has been done to death now, but which I think was fairly novel when I wrote it up for Scott’s Popped website in the late ‘90s--or a couple of pieces I did for Cinemascope around the same time, which would have been a couple of years before Kael’s death. I have no idea whether I would have had any success in getting anything to her, whether she would have liked any of it if I had, or even whether she would have bothered reading it in the first place. I’m guessing she was bombarded with stuff on a constant basis and from all directions--from the now infamous Wes Anderson solicitation to see Rushmore, to fan letters and invitations and everything in between.

Letter from Kael arrives in the mail: “Thank you for the Scorsese article, Phil. I don’t know what you’ve got here, young man…”

Wasn’t meant to be. Some consolation arrived this past year by way of A Life in the Dark, Brian Kellow’s biography of Pauline Kael. If you check in regularly with rockcritics.com, you’ll know that Scott recently posted a number of links to reviews of Kellow’s book (sometimes reviewed in tandem with The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, the third career overview of Kael’s reviews). I’m tempted to say that it’s amazing the amount of interest--often rawly contentious--that Kellow’s book has generated, but I suspect that anyone who has ever strongly felt the pull of Kael’s writing would not be surprised. People have been arguing about Kael since the mid-‘60s; the arguments didn’t stop with her retirement in 1991, and they didn’t stop with her death in 2001. There are a couple of ILX threads devoted to Kael where I’ve been posting the last couple of years, and while (to the best of my knowledge) no one on there ever personally knew Kael, some of the back and forth can get very barbed on occasion. That’s Kael. That readers can still feel so strongly about her in 2011--and I can’t think of another writer I’ve ever argued about so much; a couple of music writers are close--is, to me, the truest barometer you’ll find of just how strong that pull was. (Or, if you aren’t a fan, of how strong your aversion is. Kael’s detractors have always been fierce. But as I say in the accompanying interview, “the circle of people I travel in”--Jesus, where do I come up with this stuff?--is almost exclusively made up of fans.)

Between the message board, Kellow’s book, reviews of the book, and James Wolcott’s Lucking Out (in which Kael figures prominently) on top of all that, I’m a little Kaeled out at the moment, but before I hand it over to Brian, let me say that I think A Life in the Dark is excellent. Its portrayal of Kael did not in any way conflict with my sense of her as a reader (I feel like I have to stress that; some reviews written by friends of Kael’s--some, not by any means all--disagree), and my recognition of her influence on me has deepened. A lot of Kael’s own words make their way into A Life in the Dark via review excerpts, and I liked that: as I wrote on the message board, these excerpts--and the almost month-by-month timeline of the films that caught Kael’s attention--construct a parallel story, the story of American film from the late ‘60s through to the late ‘80s (but American films in the ‘70s especially, which has always been my own frame of reference), that is inseparable from Kael’s. Does Kellow always agree with Kael’s verdict on specific films? No--he’ll sometimes say so. Did I? No. Do I always agree with Kellow’s occasional disagreements with Kael? No. Does any of that detract from the book for me? No. The main thing was that it always felt like I was reading someone who’d been as permanently shaped by the likes of Reeling and Deeper Into Movies as I’ve been, ever since first discovering Kael at some point near the end of high school. There’s an oft-quoted line of Kael’s (a friend has it on the masthead of his blog) from her introduction to For Keeps, one of those earlier career overviews: “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” True--I wouldn’t try to argue that Kael’s body of work did not leave behind a complete world. But I’m still very glad that A Life in the Dark exists.

“One of the most powerful truths to be gleaned from examining Pauline’s life is that it was, throughout its span, a triumph of instinct over an astonishing intellect. Her highly emotional responses to art were what enabled her to make so indelible a mark as a critic. On the surface, it might seem that any critic does the same thing, but it’s doubtful that any critic ever had so little barrier between herself and her subject. She connected with film the way a great actor is supposed to connect with his text, and she took her readers to places they never could have imagined a mere movie review could transport them.”

      -- A Life in the Dark, Brian Kellow

Full interview here.

Postscript: learning for the first time, in 2026, that Brian Kellow died a few years ago: A Loving Remembrance of Brian Kellow.

(Originally published in rockcritics.com)

Start Bouncing Like You on Ritalin (2012)

2011 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “Big Wheels,” Down with Webster: I suppose that ninth-generation Beastie Boys shtick is as perilously close to Sha Na Na territory as it gets in 2011--white dopes on punk, as Frank Kogan once wrote about “Give It Away,” although being Canadian, maybe they’re more like white dopes on the McKenzie Brothers. (A compatriot, I’m allowed to say that.) That’s okay; I find Down with Webster even funnier and catchier that LMFAO (who I like fine), and they’ve got a better video, too, which may pay homage to Go Ask Alice when the singer plays Button-Button and becomes entranced by the wonderment of his hand. They’re anthemizing and strategizing for all their grown-up little kids on “Big Wheels,” massing everyone together for a weekend of bongs and vodka and suburban lawn-stumbling, and if you’re foolish enough to take their dare and phone the cops on them, they’ll just say it’s soda pop and be back next week for more. I can personally vouch for the truth of this: I’ve phoned the cops on my neighbour’s idiot offspring more than once, and it doesn’t work. They will be back again.

2. “Beautiful People,” Chris Brown, and 3. “Cheers (Drink to That),” Rihanna: I’m sure I’m not alone in noticing that these two songs come close to sharing an exact same lyric: “Don’t let them (the bastards) bring (get) you down.” I find that amazing--if you think about the backstory for a second, it’s not difficult to figure out which line goes with which song. I have no special interest in the lives of Rihanna and Chris Brown, and I came to both songs accidentally, on the radio. I’ve hardly liked anything of Rihanna’s since “If It's Lovin' That You Want”; “Beautiful People” is the first Chris Brown song I’ve ever heard. My point is that I’m not someone who was waiting to hear how their public ordeal was going to make its way into their music. But it’s obliquely on display here, and it’s hard to ignore the cross-talk. The villain dissembles (or, if you’re less charitable, lies): he looks around and sees beautiful people everywhere he goes, celebrates them over a classically serene house track, and tries to inspire with his line about not letting some unnamed them get you down. The victim, meanwhile, loses herself inside a drinking song that’s neither a sentimental tub-thumper (even though I’m sure most people hear it as such) nor a frat-house boast (see #1); there’s instead something sinister and vindictive about “Cheers (Drink to That),” really nasty Harry Nilsson/Richard Burton stuff, and her line about not letting the bastards bring you down doesn’t come across as particularly inspirational. Different people remember and react to events different ways--there’s something Rashomon-like in the way these two songs circle around each other, not in the retelling of what happened but in how the participants choose to frame their re-emergence on the other side. I should, as a symbolic gesture, reverse the order, but I do have a slight preference for “Beautiful People.”

4. “Pumped Up Kicks,” Foster the People: Except for the message board I post on, I don’t read much of anything music-related anymore, but I’ll hazard a guess that they’re being written about as the Worst Thing Ever. (Everything’s the Worst Thing Ever on a message board, so you hardly take notice.) I’ll be tired of “Pumped Up Kicks” soon, but not yet. I didn’t realize it was a shooting-spree song at first--when I used it for student-entry music at the grade school where I teach (once a week the students supply the music), another teacher asked me if I should be playing such a song. No, I guess not. Of the four shooting-spree songs I know (Boomtown Rats, Pearl Jam, Filter), this one’s far and away the sprightliest; of the dozens of whistling songs I know, this is the only one about a shooting spree.

5. “Never Will Be Mine,” Rye Rye & Robyn: More proof of the Rob Sheffield Rule, which says you can’t write a bad song about waiting by the phone; this is a great one. Robyn is as eloquent and as magisterial (in the good sense--I think there’s a good sense) as she was on “With Every Heartbeat,” wrapping her voice around resignation and transforming it into a balm, while Rye Rye’s childlike jibber-jabber is pure Judy Holliday. I’d be quite content living without a phone. I pay six or seven hundred dollars a year for the privilege of being rude to telemarketers, charitable foundations, and political canvassers. A couple of times a month I call out for pizza.

6. “Distance,” Beach Fossils, and 7. “I Never Would,” Seapony: I find it harder and harder to say anything interesting about these low-fi (whatever) half-songs that fill one or two slots on my ballot every year. I always check to see if anybody else has voted for the ones I vote for, and nobody ever does, leading me to believe there are other such songs scattered throughout individual ballots that have only one vote too. It’s sad--ephemera by no one and for one, anonymous and all but unheard, floating away into the ether as soon as they’re over.

8. “Little Miami,” Wussy: When you catch up with somebody piecemeal, like I have with Wussy, you do dumb things like put them on your 2010 year-end list for a record that came out in May of 2009. This time I’m jumping the gun a bit--I’m supposed to be getting their new album for Christmas, but all I’ve heard thus far is a three-song EP and this. I expect/hope that some of Strawberry will be even better than “Little Miami,” but either way, they’re as close as I have right now to a favourite group in the world, and I want to vote for them every chance I get. The Gun Club, my favourite group in the world in 1982, also once made a record about Miami, imagining it in more or less the same way Wussy does, as some kind of end-of-the-world bad dream. Wussy is much better than the Gun Club ever was, though. I turned 50 this year, so I’m much wiser now about such matters. I see that Christgau’s given all four Wussy albums an A--not sure if there’s ever been anyone else who also started out four-for-four. The fact that I wonder about that is another good indication I turned 50 this year.

9. “Moreover,” Wire: I saw them (still three-quarters intact) for the first time earlier in the year. It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for: of the songs I really, really wanted to hear, “Map Reference” was all I got--no “Mannequin,” “Dot Dash,” “Too Late,” or “Ahead.” Patter was at a minimum; Graham Lewis made reference to the Toronto Blue Jays at one point (amateur sabermetrician--who knew?), and that was about it. They did play “Moreover,” my favourite song from the new album. Perhaps reinvigorated by Olivier Assayas’s spectacular appropriation of “Dot Dash” in last year’s Carlos, their typically obscure objects of agitation--I don’t know that I’ve ever known what a single Wire song is actually about--are buried in a stop-start industrial drone so hard and precise on “Moreover” that Chairs Missing may as well have been last week. I’d have a hard time naming anyone who should be more encouraged to do what they do until the end of time.

10. “Born This Way,” Lady Gaga: Republican frontrunner for a few days in November, I believe she was non-Romney #19: “She’s a completely loathsome human being,” explained an Iowa caucus-goer, “but she’s very sparkly, and she’s got way too much money to ever want to take us down the path to socialism.” Her moment was brief, though, and she quickly found herself pushed aside by an even sparklier inanimate kitchen utensil. (President Romney is going to come in very handy for Lady Gaga within a couple of years, when she’s through documenting every last square inch of The Seven Stages of Me and on the lookout for something else to write about.)

For what it’s worth: I had a number of good Herman Cain quips on hand, but I didn’t know where to slot them.

Friday Evening (Sunday in the Afternoon) (2011)

2010 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “Check It Out,” Nicki Minaj & Will.I.Am: This is the second year in a row where Will.I.Am has topped my list; I must now seriously consider the possibility that he’s a genius on the order of Chuck Berry or Bill James. (Three years ago I thought he was the Antichrist, or at least one of many Antichrists. My thinking has evolved on this matter.) The story has moved along since “I Got a Feeling,” a spectacularly buoyant, endlessly playable, but nonetheless conventionally structured dance-pop primer. Half of “Check It Out” is that, the other half is compelling, speaking-in-tongues Missy Elliot weirdness. Which brings me to Nicki Minaj. I look at her, and I’m Kevin Bacon in Diner, resigned to the fact that there’s stuff going on in the world that I don’t know about. For better or worse, I grew up sneaking into my (pretty sure closeted) uncle’s room to look at his Playboys from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now that I’m about to turn 50, there is, sadly, still a part of my conception of female sexuality that goes back to the women in those magazines. Sorry--we are what we are. (George Costanza from the infamous cleavage episode: “What, am I trying to win an award here?”) So, to get to the point: just when I finally manage to get my head around Beyonce in the “Telephone” video as the last stop in comic-book voluptuousness, the very end of history, the image people throw Nicki Minaj at me. This is not good. This is not right. This is not fair.

2. “It’s Not Meant to Be,” Tame Impala: Swirly, trippy, majestic. It might more accurately be my #1 of the year, but “Check It Out” is out there, it has some meaning in the world, and my inclination with what basically amounts to a coin toss is to vote for the hit--someone may see my list and think “Oh, I know that, that’s great.” Tame Impala are a band I stumbled over on a blog. That’s not even like buying some Homestead or SST record in 1986 and trying to get people interested--it’s closer to a mirage, wrapped in a reverie, inside an abstraction. Which is a good description of what “It’s Not Meant to Be” sounds like. Which is nice.

3. “Amada Latina,” Cypress Hill: First it was Public Enemy and “For What It’s Worth,” now Cypress Hill and the catchiest part of (the very catchy, if you ask me) “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” I’m not claiming that Stephen Stills invented hip-hop. I’m just, you know, sayin’. (I’m always mindful of how increasingly out of touch I’m becoming with newer music--not inordinately so, but it’s sort of there in the background. So when I really like a new hip-hop hit, that lifts my spirits a little, makes me think I’m still in the loop. I try not to dwell on the fact that we’re now almost as far away from Cypress Hill’s first record as Cypress Hill’s first record was from “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”)

4. “Gone Missing,” Wussy: The Wussy LP is so good, it’s hard to know which song to pick; I got out a Ouija board, dart board, and magic 8-ball, and this is the one. There’s no way I should like Wussy as much as I do. There’s a basic heaviness to a lot of their songs (definitely present on “Gone Missing”) that’s normally not my kind of thing, and Chuck Cleaver’s voice has the kind of Gordon Gano/Robert Smith quaver that I usually recoil from. (As always, my points of reference are impressively up to date.) Maybe Lisa Walker being there to temper all of that puts them over for me, but it’s not like she’s a shrinking violet either--actually, it may be her more than anything that gives them a really sinister undertow. Great lines, too, which I never notice till the third or fourth time through: my two favourite on Wussy are “reflecting on the never-ending question why we’ve been born” and “I finally got your letter, and your punctuation hit me like a truck.” Punctuation is something I think about a lot. I use dashes and semi-colons way too often, and there’s always the never-ending question of where to place all the commas. And O.P.P. (other people’s punctuation), geez. That does indeed hit me like a truck sometimes.

5. “Blood Dries Darker,” Woods: I tried to get some Neil Young fans interested in this on a message board, but no takers. I’m positive this is “Powderfinger” sideways, but filtered through some vocals even more quavery than Chuck Cleaver’s--munchkin-quavery this time, like it’s sung by the Road-Eyes, those hooded creatures from Neil’s Rust Never Sleeps tour thirty years ago. I played this four or five times in a row in the car one day, and that’s when I knew it would eventually find its way onto this list.

6. “Ireland,” Hexicon: Very pretty. They’re from London, so I’m not sure why they’re writing a song about Ireland. You know, I’ve never voted for an Irish band in this poll--I wasn’t on the rolls when the Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers were around, and I’m not a fan of that other Irish band. I wonder if Nicki Minaj is popular in Ireland. I’m turning into that guy from the X song who’s always raving about Elvis. Writing about Hexicon, thinking about Nicki.

7. “Restraining Order,” Knight School: I voted for “Gardeninginginging” last year, and though their second LP just sat around unplayed for a while after one listen, I went back to it one day and eventually it sounded every bit as good as the first one. There’s no page for them on Facebook, so this may be opportunity staring me right in the face. Morrissey was president of the New York Dolls fan club, Jeffrey Lee Pierce presided over one for Blondie, now I can be the go-to guy for Knight School. I can get them out there, give them some meaning in the world.

8. “Vacation,” Beach Fossils: Grade-school teachers should not be voting for songs called “Vacation.” Vacation time is why the public loves us so much.

9. “Nothin’ on You,” B.o.B: Heard this a lot over the summer--I thought it was Kanye West. I asked one of the kids in my school who it was when it was boomed out during our annual Terry Fox Run in the fall, but, even though she was happily singing along, she didn’t know--hate to sound like every old codger who’s ever lived, but kids today just don’t obsess over music the way we did when I was 12. Nothing much else to say, so I’ll hand it over to Twin Peaks’ Man from Another Place: “Wow, B.o.B. wow!” (Try saying it like you’re talking backwards, it’s spooky.)

10. “Telephone,” Lady Gaga & Beyonce: A song about a young girl in her 20s who’s too busy to text her friend or talk on the cell phone; based on informal observations walking around the city, this immediately moves it into the realm of science fiction. The video’s outrageous. Doesn’t matter to me where it steals from, or how much--I’m sure a list of its antecedents would take up several pages. (Here’s looking at you, Tura Satana.) I give Beyonce all the credit in the world for agreeing to participate. Lady Gaga: “No one’s going to even notice me--you’ll be the star of the show, promise.” A friend told me that he thinks Beyonce’s an intrusion, but to me she’s just amazing. I was mulling over what I wanted to say about “Telephone” on the way home one day, and “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” came over the radio. Thinking about how elaborately over-the-top the “Telephone” video is, and thinking about Elton in Ken Russell’s Tommy film, I’m going to propose that one of the better things god ever did was keep a videocam out of Elton’s hands until he got old and boring. Here’s looking at you, god--well played.

Kismet (2010)

Prompted by an I Love Everything thread on Julianne Moore, I watched Magnolia again a few weeks ago for the fourth or fifth time. It's never going to be a film I love, but I feel more favorable towards it right now than at any time since first seeing it during its initial run in 1999. The performances are often amazingly subtle: Cruise got a supporting nomination, and he's very good, but Reilly and Hoffman and Dillon and others are less showy and even better. (Moore herself is another story; you'll either think she's a genius or she'll single-handedly send you running.)

And I think it may be the most ambitious American film since Cimino's Heaven's Gate. It really does try to give you the world in three hours.

Anyway, just before and after I watched it, I experienced what were to me three phenomenal coincidences:

1) Doing my radio show one Sunday, I played Roxy Music's "Editions of You," the only song of theirs I unequivocally love. Not sure why--in five years of doing the show, I think this was the only time I'd ever played Roxy Music. It wasn't even one of the theme shows I periodically do, like glam or the '70s, just a regular play-whatever-you-feel-like-playing show. Later that day, looking at the Sun's celebrity birthdays, I saw that it was Bryan Ferry's 65^th birthday.

2) Also radio-related: when I was choosing music to accompany my interview with Rob Sheffield, I went with Biz Markie's "Just a Friend." It's a song I've always liked, although it doesn't have any special significance for me. Rob barely mentions it in the book, relegating it to his multi-song cassingle chapter. The show aired on October 10, a few days after we did the interview over the phone. Later, when I was checking label information to enter on the playlist I post on this site, I noticed that The Biz Never Sleeps (the album that houses "Just a Friend") was released on October 10, 1989.

3) Tim Powis and I had been planning to see the Wall Street sequel; after rescheduling once or twice, we settled on Tuesday, October 19. As it turned out (which I knew because of the "Today in History" reading I'd done with my grade 6 class earlier that day), October 19 was the anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash--which also happened to provide the inspiration for the first Wall Street.

From Magnolia's prologue: "This was not just a matter of chance. These strange things happen all the time." And the fact that I decided to watch Magnolia, a film structured around coincidence, in the midst of these other coincidences, well, that's a coincidence in and of itself.

Ten Years After (More or Less) (2010)

I’ve been regularly posting on the I Love Baseball message board recently, kind of dipping my feet in the water after being out of the pool for a few years. A couple of years ago, on this site, I wrote that “I don't have the energy at the moment to sort through my evolving feelings about the game over the past few years, but I'm less of a fan right now than at any time since starting university 30 years ago.” As quickly as possible, and starting with the most obvious, a few reasons why:

• the pall cast by the PED era. It’s hard to overstate this. From ’93, when Griffey, Thomas, and Gonzalez all hit 40 HR in their early 20s, and Olerud made a run at .400 (I wrote a big thing on that season for Radio On), right through to Bonds’s surreal 2001-2004 block of seasons, I was completely immersed in how a generation of players was dismantling the offensive record book. Bit by bit, player by player, all of that has been reduced to something between a gigantic illusion and a bad joke. Not for everyone--on ILB and elsewhere, lots of people adamantly argue that the role of steroids was always minimal, and that Bonds and McGwire and the rest are being unfairly scapegoated. I don’t know--I started somewhere similar, but at a certain point I had to admit that my own enthusiasm had been severely dimmed. Baseball would like to you believe that the PED era is in the past now. As for usage, maybe, but as controversy, no chance--not with all of these players just now coming onto the HOF ballot.

• the Jays’ inability to re-enter the land of the living. Every now and again they tease you, and I guess it’s something that they haven’t sunk to the depths of the Orioles, Pirates, or Royals. They just tread water instead.

• some peripheral factors: the surfeit of Jays’ games on TV (too much of a mediocre thing; if they were in contention, that probably wouldn’t be a problem); taking an interest in baseball cards (connected to the offensive explosion) and then losing that interest; and Bill James’s relinquishment of the baseball-annual business to lesser competitors. I think each of those factored in.

• finally, an admission: I used to be ahead of the game, now I’m behind. When I wrote a long analysis of Joe Carter for Radio On in 1994, I felt like I had really absorbed James’s methods and knew what I was doing. I’m still at the same place, but now baseball analysis involves metrics like WAR and VORP and BABIP--I didn’t have a clue what the latter meant (batting average on balls in play) when someone tossed it my way on I Love Baseball. So I’ve become a bystander in the evolving Sabermetric takeover of player evaluation; everyone else is twittering and tumblering, and I’m still dunce-cappin’ and kazooin’.

Having said all that, I still take great interest in Hall of Fame debates. Sometime during the 2001 season, I made some projections on here as to which active players were headed for induction. I was working from Bill James’s contention that, at any given moment, it’s normal for about 30 active players to eventually end up in the HOF. I’ve been meaning to revisit my predictions ever since, so here goes. Cutting and pasting from the original piece, here were my picks:

PITCHERS -- Clemens, Maddux, Johnson, P. Martinez, Glavine, Rivera

PLAYERS -- Piazza, I. Rodriguez, McGwire, Bagwell, Palmeiro, Thomas, Thome, Helton, Alomar, Biggio, Ripken, Larkin, Jeter, A. Rodriguez, Garciaparra, C. Jones, Henderson, Gwynn, Bonds, Griffey, Sosa, Gonzalez, Ramirez, Guerrero

HITTER -- E. Martinez

There are a different ways I could organize this, but let me start with the proverbial elephant in the room, the PED guys. I’ll put them into three groups:

1.  Bonds, Clemens, and A-Rod: Depending upon how Bonds and Clemens make out in court--a nice snapshot of what it means to be a baseball fan today--I’m of the belief that the voters will exempt these three guys from PED purgatory on the basis that they had all resoundingly cleared the HOF bar before they ever started using. I think this is a somewhat common view. We’ll find out when Bonds and Clemens go on the ballot in 2012.

2. McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa, Ramirez: A.k.a., PED purgatory. Going by McGwire’s showing so far--about 25% support and dropping--these guys are simply not going into the HOF anytime soon. I’m not sure what would need to happen to turn this around.

3. Bagwell, Thome, I-Rod: What do these guys have to do with PEDs? Nothing--not that we know of, anyway, not so far. I have doubts about all three, especially Bagwell and I-Rod. (Think about the physical appearance of each of them, and combine that with the dramatic spike in their offensive numbers that occurred at some point. Bagwell came up as a Mark Grace type, a .300 hitter with 15-HR power, and for the first three years of his career, that’s exactly what he was. In 1994, he transforms himself overnight into Jimmie Foxx; in 2004, at the age of 36, he falls off the face of the Earth.) One thing that I’ve expressed on ILB and elsewhere is that, confidentiality agreement or not, the 100+ names on that 2003 report should become public knowledge. Otherwise, you may end up with a situation where guys like Ramirez and Palmeiro are barred from induction because somebody leaked their names, while, through sheer whim, a Bagwell dodges the bullet and gets in. But short of any revelations still to come, all three of these guys will be inducted.

Okay--that leaves my 21 other picks.

4. Ripken, Henderson, Gwynn: Already in.

5. Maddux, Johnson, Rivera, Piazza, Alomar, Jeter, Griffey: These are the only guys from the list who I’d put down as a 100% lock. Amazing how strong Rivera’s case has grown since the original piece, where I included him with some equivocation (“Mariano Rivera is starting to look more and more credible”) on the belief that there would have to be more than one Yankee from the late-’90s dynasty inducted. Alomar’s path has been interesting too. At the time, I was trying to figure out how high he’d end up on the career hits list (eighth, I predicted). Two things proceeded to happen: his career fell apart, and--based on last year’s vote, his first on the ballot--he seemingly became a sure thing anyway, falling only eight votes short. Bagwell and Walker come onto the ballot next year, but I can’t see him missing.

6. Pedro, Glavine, Thomas, Biggio, Chipper, Guerrero: You could probably move Glavine, Thomas, and Biggio into the group above, if you believe that 300 wins, 500 HR, and 3,000 hits are still invulnerable benchmarks. Because they all hung around longer they should have to get there, I won’t quite go that far, but I’m still 95% certain that all six of these guys are first-, second-, or third-balloters. Even with Pedro’s many ordeals since coming over to the National League, he’s still sitting with over 200 wins, a career winning pct. of almost .700, a career E.R.A. under 3.00, three Cy Youngs (and the fifth-highest total ever for career pct. of Cy Young vote), and one of the handful of greatest post-WWII seasons ever for a starting pitcher in 1999 (or 2000, take your pick).

7. Helton, Larkin: I’ve never been big on Larkin’s chances, but I included him last time because most everyone else seemed to think he was HOF-bound. Last year was his first time on the ballot; he drew 51.6% of the vote, which I’m guessing is historically very promising. There will be lots of competition coming onto the ballot in the next few years, so I’m pretty much exactly where I was on his chances 10 years ago; I don’t know. Helton, I think, is perilously close to no chance, although I wouldn’t completely write him off yet. He’s been on steady drift since 2004, so at 37, he’d have to do something dramatic pronto. His Sabermetric numbers are there, but he doesn't have anywhere near the career totals he’d need. Walker’s support next year should tell us something about where the voters stand on numbers compiled in Colorado.

8. Gonzalez (as in, “Juan Gone”--you do remember him, right?), Martinez, Garciaparra. Gonzalez goes onto the ballot next year; I’m guessing he does somewhat better than Albert Belle’s 7.7% first time around, after which he disappears. Edgar drew 36% of the vote last year, his debut; not a promising start for a DH. Strange, but I never mentioned Garciaparra anywhere in the original piece, just included him on my HOF list--strange because he missed almost the entirety of the 2001 season, the first of many injuries that would derail his career. I guess I assumed that, still only 28, 2001 would be a blip from which he'd quickly recover. He did, for two more HOF-caliber seasons, then physical deterioration did him in. In a way, he's Mattingly to Alomar's Puckett; their careers were all ended prematurely, but two of them had cleared the bar and two of them hadn't.

-------------------

If I were to knock off the confirmed PED group, and also groups 7 and 8 above, that would leave 22 of my original 31 as going in, with 9 falling short. Who would be my nine picks today to replace them?

• Albert Pujols: If he’s ever linked to steroids, MLB may as well put the “Closed” sign up in the shop window.

• Ichiro: You can’t really compare him to any precedent. Whatever his (clear) Sabermetric shortcomings, I’m pretty sure he’ll go in on the first ballot.

• John Smoltz: Didn’t include him last time, after which he had three good-to-phenomenal years as a closer, followed by three more very solid years as a starter. That left him with 213 wins, 154 saves, a career E.R.A. of 3.33, and a full season's worth of great post-season numbers compiled for the Braves; I think he’ll go in. (One point of contention on ILB has been how much weight should be given to Billy Wagner's dismal post-season stats. I've been arguing that post- season performance should only tip the scales if the sample is large enough--only 11.2 innings for Wagner--and that I'm more inclined to count the post-season for somebody than against him. Smoltz benefits on both counts.)

• Trevor Hoffman: Whatever the HOF bar is for a closer, I can’t see that 600 saves and a sub-3.00 E.R.A. wouldn’t be safely on the other side.

• Roy Halladay, Johan Santana, C.C. Sabathia, Tim Lincecum: Not all of them--let’s say one for sure, maybe two. Halladay is looking really strong at the moment.

• Miguel Cabrera, Joe Mauer. Today, on track to be 100% locks. But they’re both 27; cf., Juan Gonzalez.

• Any One or Two from a Bunch of Other People: I’ve engaged in some back-and-forth on ILB with regards to Wagner and Paul Konerko the past couple of days--longshots both, but working on better resumes than you might think. Sheffield and his 500 HR are in purgatory, so no need to include him. Hanley Ramirez, Ryan Howard, Robinson Cano, Oswalt, Pedroia, Damon...there are a lot of possibilities. When it comes to prognostication, I still defer to Casey Stengel’s famous assessment of Greg Goosen: “We got a young catcher right here, he's 20 years old and in 10 years, he's got a chance to be 30.”

Ambulance Fever (2010)

My old high-school friend Steve recently e-mailed me the following, with no accompanying words other than a "Too bad no sound" subject heading. By "no sound," I guess he meant actual voices; I think the song that plays overtop for the first half works just fine.*

I don't want to write too much here, because if the video should get pulled, anything I say won't mean nearly as much without the pictures. I learned from the Obama blog how tenuous YouTube links are; I think about half the video I embedded has since vanished. (Truthfully, I'm still waiting for YouTube in general to drastically curtail access. I use it regularly in the classroom now, not just for Ed Sullivan clips and the like, but also for science and math--it all seems too good to be true.)

I will say that this gets as close as anything I can think of to what it was like to be in high school in my hometown of Georgetown in the mid-'70s. Dazed and Confused, if you will, except it's not a movie--this is the thing itself. I feel like I should recognize most of the faces, but other than what I think is one of the Bratkin sisters around the 3:20 mark, I don't recognize anybody. I'm about five years younger than the people here. And this wasn't my life in a literal sense, in that my friends and I did our drinking and drugging in our own little universe that mostly ran parallel to the one documented here. (Adam Goldberg's triangle in Dazed and Confused makes for a rough analogy.) But in a much deeper sense, I lived this exactly. I've tried to write about that time on many occasions, in Why Music Sucks and elsewhere. I think I caught some of what it was like, but I just can't write well enough to put into words what's above. What the Dead Sea Scrolls or a newly unearthed Robert Johnson recording might be to someone else, that's more or less how I feel about this footage. Not to over-dramatize or anything.

Of special interest: right at the five minute mark, two people walk past G&S Television, where 35 years ago I bought the albums that launched my record collection.

*2026 update: the sound has been removed since I wrote this 16 years ago. I can't remember the name of the song that played overtop--nothing famous--but in context, it worked perfectly.

Logorrhea (2010)

The good thing about keeping a page that nobody reads: flexible deadlines. The bad thing about keeping a page that nobody reads: nobody reads it. A little late, but my favourite films of the 2000s.

1. Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz, 2002): I’ve shown this to my class every year since it topped my 2003 year-end (at which point I’d already seen it three or four times), so I’ve seen it about a dozen times by now. My admiration hasn’t dimmed a bit. Rather than repeat everything I wrote eight years ago, I’ll link to my original comments on rockcritics.com. About halfway into the film, right after the eight principals have been introduced, I always hit pause and survey my students on whom they think will win (working from the assumption that the winner will be drawn from the eight kids we’ve met). They always overwhelmingly zero in on Neil; the actual winner, whom I won’t name in case anyone hasn’t seen this yet, has never elicited more than a couple of votes (and sometimes doesn’t receive any). Above and beyond Spellbound’s inexhaustible surprises, its influence is large. I can think of at least four really good documentaries (one listed below, the other three close runners-up) that exist in Spellbound’s shadow: most obviously Mad Hot Ballroom, a virtual remake transposed to a different context; Wordplay and Word Wars, for the lexicography angle; and, a spiritual offshoot, The Heart of the Game. I was surprised by how disappointing Rocket Science, Blitz’s fictional follow-up, was--ambitious, for sure, but a real mess. Rechecking that film’s title on IMDB, though, I see he has gone on to direct a number of Office episodes. I don’t watch The Office myself, but, just in case Spellbound’s Harry gets a cameo in some upcoming Blitz-directed episode, maybe I should start.

2. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007): I hated Fight Club--bombastic, ugly, pleased with its ugliness (I won’t hold the movie responsible for the 5-cent gimmick that presumably belongs to the book)--and a second look at Seven recently wasn’t what I’d call a wise decision. I’ve seen Zodiac six or seven times, and its pull just gets stronger and stronger--I leant it out two weeks ago, and I wish I had it here right now to watch again. When I run the film over in my mind to try to understand why I love it so much, I get a little lost. One explanation may reside in a criticism levelled by San Francisco blogger Steven Rubio: “Yet the film never bothers to explain to us exactly why Graysmith is obsessed with the case. He's on the periphery of the events that take place in the Chronicle, he likes to solve puzzles, and then suddenly the identity of the Zodiac killer is all he cares about. But nothing in the film convincingly shows how that obsessive leap takes place.” Agreed--except that I count that unexplained obsessiveness as one of Zodiac’s greatest strengths. I’m someone who’s had my share of obsessions over the years, some productive and some not, some a lot easier to explain than others. Do I understand why I’ve combatted, and continue to combat, a severe addiction to online Scrabble the past seven years? Not really, no--some obsessions defy explanation. So when Graysmith visits fellow-obsessive Paul Avery at one point to try to revive Avery’s interest in the case--Avery having dropped out of sight, his years trying to uncover Zodiac’s identity having decimated his life--Graysmith gives voice to something they both know to be true, even if neither can explain it: “It was important.” It’s a great, great moment. And as good as both Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey are--Downey manages to modulate his congenital showiness enough to disappear into his role--the performance that most knocks me out is Mark Ruffalo’s. His mounting exasperation as he tries to keep one step ahead of Gyllenhaal and Downey’s Good Hardy Boy/Bad Hardy Boy tag-team is something to see.

3. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003): Speaking of performances, Bill Murray gets the nod for the decade. I wrote at the time that he doesn’t go as deep in LiT as he did in Rushmore--specifically, the moment where he meets Max’s father--and I might stand by that. Or I might not; his karaoke run-throughs of “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love & Understanding” and “More Than This” are as good as it gets. I vividly recall feeling stunned when he lost the Academy Award that year to Sean Penn’s huffing and puffing in Mystic River. (I shouldn’t have, of course--the Academy Awards are a dog-and-pony show, Penn gave exactly the kind of performance that wins, etc., etc. Even knowing all that, it still threw me. And, if I’m remembering correctly, Murray looked a little stunned too.) So they got Murray’s character right, but for the film to work, they had to get Scarlett Johansson’s right too. They did. (Middle-aged sigh.) They did.

4. The Heart of the Game (Ward Serrill, 2005): Another one I show annually to my class, taking care to hit the mute button when Darnellia goes off on the guy in the stands. (There’s another random “Fuck!” in the locker room after a close loss; that one’s tougher to dodge, but I manage.) Darnellia and Bill Resler are just about the best movie odd couple this side of, I don’t know, Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. And I mention lambs only because they might have worked for one of Coach Resler’s sales pitches to his players: “Okay, girls, this year I want you to think ‘Flock of Lambs’--wild and wooly on the outside, loyal to the herd, a solid core of gentility underneath.” I’m totally winging it, just like Resler. (Came across this when I checked to see if he was still coaching. Sad.)

5. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005): Such an odd film--I knew I’d seen something the first time I saw it, I just wasn’t sure what. It’s about Laura Linney, who’s sane, and the three men she lives with (as the story begins, anyway), who aren’t. They hiss at each other for 70 minutes, then the older son buckles under the weight of all the hissing and breaks down crying. Then he runs off to the museum. And if that isn’t enough for three or four films, I also owe Baumbach for introducing me to Bert Jansch. I went home that night and tracked down “Courting Blues,” played over the end credits, immediately leading me to “Running from Home,” which on some days is my favourite song ever. He did it all over again in his next film, the good but lesser Margot’s Wedding, this time unearthing Karen Dalton.

6. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003): When I saw this the first time, I hadn’t seen Gerry, and I didn’t know about Bela Tarr. Elephant made an impression on me--I’ll again link back to my original comments--but you can tell I’m a little out of my element. I had to get past that “Oh.” I did: four or five viewings later, I find Van Sant’s conception of Columbine deeply moving. That “teenage small-talk” I referred to somewhat dismissively matters a lot—more than anything, it’s what the killers violate, and Van Sant very methodically makes sure you feel that violation--as does all the dreamy tracking. And that’s where Gerry and Tarr come in; I’d already come to love Elephant by the time I caught up with its antecedents (just within the past couple of months, to be honest), so it was actually Elephant that helped me find my way into them.

7. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Martin Scorsese, 2005): A friend of mine has assured me that this is Dylan’s film, not Scorsese’s--starting with the fact that all of Dylan’s interviews were conducted with an interviewer of his choice, probably even wholly scripted by him (cf. Nate Hentoff in 1966, if legend is to be believed). Maybe; I honestly don’t know, and I’m not sure it makes a difference. There’s just so much stuff to lose yourself in here, and out of the morass, the chaotic sweep of events, a story does come into focus, one that has something to do with the way Dylan spends much of the film trying to disengage himself from those events, constantly reminding the interviewer that that--politics, folk music, glamour, “the sixties”--was their thing, not his. Nothing new, I guess, he’s been feinting and dodging forever; I’m Not There might have been a good title too. There’s a multiplicity of other stories that come into focus, too, criss-crossing all over each other, and they’re harder to sort out. In one of my favourite conceits in the film, the Beatles get acknowledged exactly twice: once verbally (something along the lines of “Would you ask the Beatles that?!” at one of those toxic press conferences), the other time as a listing in Billboard (in a close-up of the chart where “Like a Rolling Stone” hits #2, you can see the Beatles sitting at #1 with “Help”). “Oh yeah, those guys...” That very noticeable omission is a pretty good story in and of itself.

8. No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007): The older I get, the greater my aversion to screen violence. The violence in No Country is so swift and so drastic—in impact, I mean, not in quantity (it’s like The Godfather that way)--not to mention so loud, I was on edge for the duration the first time I saw it, on edge in a very unpleasant way, and in fact spent a lot of the time semi-covering my eyes. Yes, I still do that at movies that scare me. But after a second and third viewing mitigated all the nasty stuff, I was able to appreciate just how beautifully, and classically, this film was structured (something it shares with the similarly triangulated Zodiac). Jones and Bardem are great--conceding that Bardem’s character is essentially an arted-up version of Jason or Freddy Kruger--but, again as with Zodiac, I’ll single out the less celebrated vertex of the triangle, Josh Brolin, as giving the subtlest performance among the three leads. I’ve seen a lot of Coen Brothers films over the past 25 years; this joins Miller’s Crossing and Fargo as the only ones I love (and it didn’t happen immediately with Fargo, either).

9. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001): Coming on the heels of Crumb, I think I decided Zwigoff was the world’s greatest director when I first saw this. I lost track of him after Art School Confidential (liked that one too, with reservations), but I watched Ghost World again a couple of years ago, and it held up very well. The best moment is right out of Crumb--when Enid throws the Skip James record (of which there are “eight known copies” according to MetaFilter) on her chintzy turntable one night and disappears.

10. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (Ric Burns, 2006): In an almost identical version of this list I submitted to an I Love Everything poll a few weeks ago, I had this at #11 and Wendy and Lucy at #10. I’ve only seen Wendy and Lucy once, though, and just don’t remember enough specifics to write about it, so I’ll go with the Warhol documentary. I liked Chuck Workman’s Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol from a few years ago, but Burns’s PBS-sponsored version dwarfs it. (Stuff you find out when checking credits: Workman released a documentary last year on Jonas Mekas. Hadn’t heard a word about it—can’t wait till it makes its way here.) I don’t know if this is as dense as No Direction Home (also of PBS origin--I think both were part of American Masters), but clocking in at an extra 40 minutes, you can bet there’s quite a morass to lose yourself in here, too. There's a section on the JFK assassination right at the end of part one that I’d probably name as my single favourite sequence of the decade. You see the assassination through Warhol’s eyes; he’s still feeling his way at the time, still trying to get his name out there, and the '60s--and everything that that phrase has come to encapsulate--have begun but haven’t begun. He hears the news, goes back to his studio (“What does this mean?” he keeps asking anyone within earshot), and before long is furiously painting those now-iconic images of the grieving widow. As one of the interviewees explains it: “He understood instantaneously the second Liz turned into ‘Liz’--which was with her tracheotomy, and her sexual scandals in the early ‘60s--and with Jackie, the second JFK was shot, just to understand that immediately they were...incomprehensible spectacles that would make one speechless to contemplate. And he got that immediately.”

Melodramatic? Maybe--give me some evocative music in the background, and my defences against such rhetoric crumble away. Not only do I buy it, I want to live inside those quotation marks; my new greatest aspiration in life is to become an incomprehensible spectacle that would make one speechless to contemplate.

-------------------

Ten more:

11. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
12. The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia (Jennifer Baichwal, 2002)
13. Stevie (Steve James, 2002)
14. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007)
15. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (Kevin Rafferty, 2008)
16. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Seth Gordon, 2007)
17. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Marini Zenovich, 2008)
18. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen (Christopher Browne, 2004)
19. Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
20. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003)

Finally, the decade’s big film story for me, living in Toronto (perhaps mirrored in other cities), was the closure of so many theatres. We lost the Bloor repertory chain (since resurrected, sort of, but not nearly as good), the York, the Eaton Centre Cineplex (I saw both Persona and C.H.U.D. there!), the Uptown and Uptown Backstage, the Hyland, the Humber, the Carlton...I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few. Maybe you’d expect to lose that many theatres in the course of a decade, I don’t know; it felt like an onslaught. I’d be surprised if the Cumberland lasts too much longer. Here I am on the Carlton’s last night. Just to clarify, I’m waving goodbye to the theatre, not to capitalism or Michael Moore, at least one of which I’m hoping lasts.