I've Been Getting Messages (2014)

2013 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “Knowing We'll Be Here,” Daniel Avery: Occupies some space between bliss and grace, like “Inspector Norse” from last year, minus the crazy drug fiend in Todd Terje’s video. Words like “bliss” and “grace” are the limits of my ability to write about a song like this--sometimes I’ll throw in “serene,” too, and that’s about it. I was checking one publication’s list of Top 50 Dance Songs online, and along with every video clip there was a capsule write-up, seemingly all of them by the same writer. As I idly read a few while playing the clips, I found myself more and more impressed by the writer’s ease and assuredness in micro-differentiating between songs and sub-sub-genres that would blur together for almost anyone, me included. Not that the songs all sounded the same, they didn’t, but the language this writer was able to summon went above and beyond the call of duty. I couldn’t do it.

I’m also impressed, and amazed, by the way “Knowing We’ll Be Here” and “Inspector Norse” are able to reach me. I’m as far away from their intended audience as possible. My only connection to the clubs where they were meant to be heard is when I drive across Richmond Street, through Toronto’s club district, after a late film at the Lightbox. Drunken sparkly people half my age spill onto the street--I’m worried one of them will pound the side of my car as I come to a stop at an intersection, which might cause me to want to intentionally run that person over, and that’d be bad. I navigate my way through, drive the rest of the way home, listen to “Knowing We’ll Be Here,” and construct my own club in my head.

2. “Echelon (It's My Way),” Angel Haze: I’m so enamored of this song, I want to quit my life and go help her out in all these feuds she’s having with record companies and rivals. “These bitches is awful”--such a great line; I hate them all. The Mary-Kate and Ashley clones, I hate them too. (I thought it was Mary J. clones until I checked a lyrics page.) I’m starting to get worked up just thinking about these people. I’m starting to get aggy. The anomalous celestial-choir voices that pop up initially threw me, but I’ve come to love the way Angel Haze cuts across them, followed by my favourite part of the record, the “killing those motherfuckers” chorus that sounds like, I don’t know, the Go! Team or something else I can’t quite figure out. Listening to this young black woman curse and fulminate probably amounts to the same illicit thrill that’s been placing profane hip-hop songs on my year-end lists since Schoolly-D in 1986. I’m so white, it’s awful.

3. “I’ll Be Around,” Yo La Tengo: My favorite video this year was, predictably, the one that Vania Heymann put together for “Like a Rolling Stone.” Next--I see very few videos these days--would be Yo La Tengo’s for “I’ll Be Around.” I can’t imagine where it would ever get played, so I’m sure it exists nowhere except on YouTube. Close to 200,000 views, though, some of them not by me.

It’s set in a forest clearing, then in a kitchen. Text is all over the screen--what looks to be a short story but on closer inspection is a mishmash of Yo La Tengo lyrics past and present, excerpts from said mishmash, and a recipe for Spicy Tortilla Soup. Once inside the kitchen, the band putters around and makes their soup, they sit down to dinner, then a couple of cops come and take James McNew away. Ira and Georgia look perplexed. I’m not sure...maybe the joke is trying to introduce some adventure and intrigue into three of the most domesticated lives imaginable. (A title card early on says “Based on Actual Events,” which is then amended to “Inspired by Actual Events”--there may be some poetic license.)  Or maybe McNew is about to leave the band, and this is their way of breaking the news. It’s quite cryptic.

Fade has everything you might love or despise about Yo La Tengo. After two or three songs I don’t care for (including “Om,” the one song that seemed to get some attention), I think it’s a perfect album. “I’ll Be Around” continues a tradition (shared by Neil Young) of stealing titles from famous songs; the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” is one of my favourite songs from my favourite year ever, and I think I like Yo La Tengo’s “I’ll Be Around” even more. Their whispery ambience has never felt closer, or, at the same time, just as out of reach. Always just out of reach.

4. “Nothing Is Real,” Boards of Canada: My favourite most-hated film ever is American Beauty, and my favourite most-hated scene--quite reviled--is Wes Bentley’s paper-bag monologue. You know the scene--the one where he gets a catch in his throat and starts tearing up because he can’t find the words to adequately express the beauty of the world. “It was one of those days, when it’s a minute away from snowing,” and off he goes--so overcome by the benevolent force that watches out for him and makes him not afraid, an “entire life behind things,” that he says his heart’s going to cave in.

I’ve written about that scene before. I bring it up here because I’d ask anyone who shares in the widespread revulsion to give “Nothing Is Real” a listen and decide whether it isn’t trying to capture something similar. Maybe the objection is simply Bentley, maybe it’s spill-over from the rest of the movie, or maybe it’s simply the presumption and pretension of trying to find words for feelings that can’t be contained by words. I watched the entirety of Six Feet Under for the first time earlier this year (same writer as American Beauty), and it aimed for some of the same feelings--and every so often found them, I’d say.

“Nothing Is Real” reminds me of a song by the Hylozoists, “Soixante-Sept,” about Canada’s centennial in 1967. Same stillness, same calm--the Hylozoists overlay French horns, and some audio of Montreal’s then-mayor, Jean Drapeau. This is the first Boards of Canada song I’ve ever heard. Reading that they took their name and something of their approach from old National Film Board documentaries makes sense when I think about “Soixante-Sept.”

5. “Avant Gardener,” Courtney Barnett: Australian--same part of the world as Lourdes, give or take a time zone or three. I thought “Royals” was striking the first few times; skip forward a few weeks of hearing it constantly as my grade 7 art classes listened to the radio, and I’d had enough of “Royals” for several lifetimes. Would that be true of “Avant Gardener” if it had been the fluke hit instead? I don’t think so--or rather, I think it's a song that would eventually emerge on the other side and sound fabulous again. That happened to me with “Loser” once. When I finally had a chance to write about it in my old fanzine, soon after it had fallen off the charts, I was so tired of it I just gave it a rating and left the gushing to everyone else. Today, it again sounds like the greatest thing in the world.

“Avant Gardener” does in fact meld Beck, one of his spacier slide-guitar songs, with Liz Phair. Instead of fragmentary gibberish about loveseats and chimpanzees, I’m guessing Barnett is an actual asthmatic singing drolly of her actual daily ordeals. (I don’t know--tried to confirm this and couldn’t.) She neologizes as imaginatively as Clipse: “I’m breathing but I’m wheezing/Feel like I’m emphysemin’.” I’ve never seen an episode of Breaking Bad, but “I guess the neighbours must think we run a meth lab/We should amend that” makes me want to catch up. As everything winds down, there are a few seconds of noodling around that sound like they’re lifted from Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me (Not to Come),” which was also about someone who had trouble catching his breath.

6. “Adjustments,” Benoit & Sergio: “Sometimes I think the DJs don’t understand”--contemplative, like when Hot Chip’s “The Warning” ruminated on silence, broken melodies, and getting lost. I can never make out the next line, though, so I’ve never found out exactly what it is that the DJs don’t understand. But the rest of the song makes that clear anyway--no need to check a lyrics page. Silence, getting lost, it’s all there.

7. “Work Bitch,” Britney Spears: A lot of songs on here appeal to--embody--my sense of beauty, so I’m glad to include this one bit of insanely funny shamelessness. Britney Spears has been pretty much the most useless pop star on the planet for me the past 15 years--I think the only song of hers I didn’t mind was her first single, which at the time inspired me to rewrite the Who's "Pictures of Lily" as "Pictures of Britney" and submit it to Chuck Eddy at the Voice, a somewhat obscure bit of rock-critic silliness. Somewhere along the way, critics started to like her, with “Toxic” doing very well in year-end polls. Couldn’t stand it; just checked, still can’t. I could have listed her twice this year, though--also like “Scream and Shout” a lot. The first time I heard “Scream and Shout,” via video, I thought that if any song ever had a chance to redefine gruesome, this was the one; before long, it added to my sense that Will.i.am possesses a peculiar kind of pop-music genius.

“Work Bitch” makes me think back to TLC’s “Waterfalls,” where they counselled moderation and patience right around the time they were setting things on fire and declaring bankruptcy. Here, the lecture is on initiative and perseverance--if you want stuff, really important stuff like parties in France, you need to stay focussed, hold your head high, call the governor, make the bubble up...well, she starts speaking in tongues a bit, but the message is clear. And if it isn’t, there’s always the helpful “You better work, bitch/Now get to work, bitch!” to clear things up. Good show: if I could hold up one person for my students whose every public action exemplifies the very meaning of work ethic, Britney Spears would be my first choice. (Cheap shot--I imagine she works 40 times harder than I do, albeit with a little bit of messiness attached.)

The music here is amazingly propulsive. I think it’s “Superstition,” more or less, trashed up and amped up and sped up beyond lawsuits. It slows down and coalesces in all the right places. She throws in a fake English accent on the word “hot.” Why, I don’t know. She says “bitch” at least as well as Angel Haze, and better than Young Thug. She’ll probably make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame one day--everyone except England Dan and John Ford Coley does now--and because of this song, I’ll be okay with that.

8. “An Impression,” No Age, and 9. “North Sea Girls,” Wussy: This is the fourth year in a row I’ve voted for Wussy, so I’m running out of things to say about them. Wussy, you’re not going to be famous. Looking forward to Attica--great meet-me-where-I-come-from title. I’m late to No Age. At first I was going to list “C’mon, Stimmung,” which is about as melodic as skronk ever gets, but here and there the vocal bugs me. No such problem with “An Impression”; quite beautiful, especially when it morphs into Another Green World. I want to go back and hear all their previous records.

My exposure to both bands came via Christgau. A few months ago, the Consumer Guide bowed out for the second or third (fourth?) time. (It hasn’t always been called the Consumer Guide, but as long as there were capsule reviews with letter grades, it still felt like the Consumer Guide.) My guess is it won’t be back this time, and that saddens me more than I would have expected. After devouring his ‘70s book in my 20s, and then really caring about Pazz & Jop results all through the ‘80s, I basically shut out Christgau through the ‘90s. I’d been writing for a few years by then, and was putting out a fanzine with a number of Pazz & Jop voters as contributors. I was mad that I wasn’t getting a ballot myself (why I thought Christgau would know about my fanzine without someone actually giving him a copy, I’m not sure). Somewhere in there a friend and I put out a book on pop music in the ‘70s, and I made sure that we omitted Christgau in the acknowledgements, where we listed a few key music books covering the decade--against mild objections from my friend, as I remember it, but he didn’t make an issue of it. One review made mention of Christgau's ‘70s book, hinting that it was an odd omission. Anyway, for as long as it lasted, it was an excellent grudge. Like many of my grudges it was secret, so the world went ahead as before.

These days I defend Christgau when message-board posters pick over some CG entry from 40 years ago. (“How did he not know that Black Sabbath would have critical cachet in 2013? What the hell was he thinking?” I’m exaggerating, somewhat.) Not that there’s a great deal of that right now--after he left the Voice, the number and intensity of arguments about him seemed to diminish. People who were edited by him almost always single him out as the best line-editor they ever had. I wish I’d had that chance, but I don’t know how enjoyable that would have been--whatever stylistic influence he had on me disappeared soon after I started writing, and I like to leave in all the “well”s and “I don’t know”s he obviously had no patience for, so maybe it would have been a demoralizing experience. But as someone who got into my bloodstream early on--I continued to check the Consumer Guide reflexively, through all its incarnations and right to the very end (if it is...)--he belongs up there with Kael, Marcus, Bill James, and Stanley Kauffmann as a compass. Kauffmann died this year, and I paid tribute to him elsewhere. Call the Wussy and No Age songs partly my belated tribute to Christgau.

10. “Picacho,” Young Thug: Not sure what he’s going on about. The very un-thuggish backing track is pretty enough that he could be singing about Pikachus for all I care.

Crossroads (2013)

This past Christmas, presumably filling airtime during the hockey strike, TSN was rebroadcasting the ’92 World Series. I saw parts of Games 1 and 5, but missed the one I really wanted to see, Game 3, with Devon White’s triple-play-that-wasn’t-called (as clear as ever looking at the replay on YouTube). I couldn’t even remember who won Game 1 as I watched the middle innings over at my sister’s--guessed the Jays, but it was Atlanta.

The ‘92 Jays’ pitching staff has taken on a certain retroactive fascination for me over the years. Has a deeper staff ever been assembled? I don’t mean deep in terms of what they accomplished that particular year--like most any team, even division winners, the ‘92 Jays had a bunch of guys at different stages of their careers, some pitched well and some didn’t, and as a team they only finished in the middle of the league in ERA (bottom half, actually)--but rather when you take a step back and look at their staff from the standpoint of career accomplishments in the aggregate. There are a variety ways you could try to measure the somewhat amorphous concept of “deepness”--wins, career WAR, and career ERA are the three most obvious--but none of them are quite what I had in mind.

On Fangraphs’ WAR table, a season of 4.0-5.0 is designated as an all-star season, and that’s much closer to what I wanted to measure: how many all-star seasons, quantified objectively, did these pitchers produce over the course of their careers? (Okay--I’m fudging the numbers a bit here. Baseball Reference, whose WAR figures are the ones I’m actually using, identifies an All-Star season as 5.0+. In all honesty, though, 4.0-5.0 on BR looks All-Star calibre to me. Here are some names that fell in that range last year: Melky Cabrera, Aaron Hill, Gio Gonzalez, Cole Hamels, Albert Pujols, Alex Rios, Felix Hernandez. Surely they all met the All-Star threshold.) When I look at the ’92 Jays, I see so many guys, both starters and relievers, who had long, successful careers. Only one them, Jack Morris, looks like he’ll end up in the Hall of Fame, even though they likely had four other starters who were better itchers. But as a group, there are enough 4.0+ WAR seasons for four or five Hall of Famers. Let me look at the starters, first---I’ll get to the relievers after that. (I’m using WAR here because the numbers are easy for me to access. You could probably use James’s Win Shares and end up more or less the same place.)

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Group 1: Hanging On

Jack Morris – Morris was the team’s putative ace in ’92: a big free-agent signing from the Twins (coming off his famous Game 7 win), he went on to record a 21-6 record, and he started the opening game of the World Series. As was often the case with Morris, his W-L record was misleading--he really didn’t pitch all that well in ’92, with a below-league-average 4.04 ERA and a lousy K/BB ratio. He could just as easily have gone 15-12. He got hammered by the Braves in the World Series and was finished by 1994. Over the course of his career, Morris had five seasons of 4.0+ WAR: 1979, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1991.

Dave Stieb – I can’t remember if he went down with an injury or if he just got pulled from the rotation, but Stieb was terrible in ’92, pitching fewer than 100 innings. He didn’t pitch an inning during the postseason--pretty sure he wasn’t even activated--and 1993 would essentially be his final year. (He attempted a comeback in ’98, something I have no recollection of.) Total 4.0+ WAR seasons: seven, all but one during the ‘80s.

Group 2: Prime, More or Less

Jimmy Key – Key was right in the middle of his career in ’92, his last year with the Jays; he moved over to the Yankees in ’93, where he contended for the Cy Young his first two seasons. His final season was 1998. Total 4.0+ WAR seasons: seven.

David Cone – Getting Cone from the Mets late in ‘92 (August 27, for Jeff Kent...) was the move that finally got the Jays to the finish line for the first time. He only threw 50 (very effective) innings in the regular season, but he had two starts in each of the LCS and World Series; for anyone who remembers, though, the real key were the reverberations his acquisition sent around the league--it had never been clearer that the Jays were going all in. He was gone in ’93, won the Cy Young in the strike season of ’94, and had three very good years (and one abysmal one) with the Yankees in the late ‘90s. Total 4.0+ WAR seasons: eight.

Juan Guzman – He was maddening to watch, forever fidgeting and shaking off his catcher, but Guzman pulled off a pretty good Whitey Ford imitation his first three years in the league. He won 40 of his first 51 decisions, twice posting sub-3.00 ERAs, and in ’96 he led the league in ERA. By the time he left for Baltimore in ’98, he had long worn out his welcome. Total 4.0+ WAR seasons: two.

Group 3: Just Getting Started

David Wells – Wells started 14 games for the Jays in ’92, same number as Stieb, and didn’t pitch well. He was 29 years old and had 47 career wins at that point; I doubt many people expected him to win almost 200 more games the rest of the way. Total 4.0+ WAR seasons: six.

Al Leiter – ’92 was a low point in Leiter’s career. The Jays got him from the Yankees in ’89 for Jesse Barfield, and for the next four seasons he was constantly on the disabled list. It was amazing--from ‘89-‘92, he pitched a sum total of 15.2 innings for the Jays (exactly 1.0 in ’92). He was healthier from ‘93-‘95, pitching well in two of those seasons, but I guess the Jays had had enough, and they traded him to Florida. From that point forward, at the age of 30, he turned it around completely, going 122-88 with a 3.44 ERA over the next nine seasons. Total 4.0+ WAR seasons: five, including his last season with the Jays.

Pat Hentgen – ‘92 was Hentgen’s second season, and it wasn’t until ’93 that he became a full time starter (going 19-9 and finishing sixth in Cy Young voting). He went on to win the Cy in ’96, and for the most part had a good decade run with Toronto. Total 4.0+ WAR seasons: three.

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So: you’ve got eight different starters right there, all in the same place at the same time, responsible for 43 seasons of 4.0+ WAR pitching. Todd Stottlemyre was also around, and he never had a 4.0+ season--he got close a couple of times, in ’91 and ’94. But he did a) win 138 games over his career (.533 winning pct.), b) pitch over 2000 innings and strike out over 1500 batters, c) have a full-time spot in some team’s rotation nine different seasons, and d) author the most entertaining godawful slide ever in Game 4 of the '93 Series. He was never a star, was never really close. But neither was his career negligible.

Looking at the Jays’ relievers, I’ll have to rely on more traditional metrics. To compile a 4.0+ WAR for a season, you pretty much have to be a starter--relievers pulled off a few such seasons when they were throwing 100+ innings a year (a couple of examples: Goose Gossage in ’75, Mike Marshall in ’79), but ever since Dennis Eckersley redefined the closer’s role in the late ‘80s, 4.0+ relief seasons are almost unheard of. Even Eric Gagne, in his near-perfect Cy Young season of 2003, only compiled a 3.9 WAR. (As it turns out, the ’92 Jays did have one of those relievers who once posted a 4.0+ season on their roster.)

The most important guy in the bullpen on the ’92 Jays was, of course, Tom Henke, who was finishing off an exceptional seven-plus-year run as the team’s closer. Where did Henke rank during those years (1985-1992)?  Dennis Eckersley, even though wasn’t converted to a closer until 1987, was #1; from ’88-’92, he vies with Mariano Rivera as the best closer ever. As to who was second-best, here’s a very quick comparison of Henke to three other ubiquitous names during those years:

Henke: 217 saves, 2.48 ERA

Jeff Reardon: 271/3.51

Lee Smith: 275/2.89

John Franco: 222/2.47

Pretty much dead even with Franco in the #2 slot, unless you prefer Smith’s bulk save total. And Henke pitched in the DH league, unlike Franco.

The Jays’ set-up man in ’92 was Duane Ward. Because Ward burned out so quickly--he retired in ’95 at age 31--it might not be appreciated just how dominant he was from 1991-93 (he moved into the closer role in ’93, after Henke left). His rate stats for those three seasons: 2.31 ERA, 6.6 H/9, 10.7 K/9, 3.42 K/BB ratio. Not quite Eckersley numbers, but--in ’92 and ’93 especially--he was awesome.

Midway through the ’92 season, the Jays brought Mark Eichhorn back in a trade with the Angels. Eichhorn was still remembered for his phenomenal rookie year with the team in ’86 (14-6 in 157 innings of middle relief, 1.72 ERA, under a baserunner per inning, and, yes, a 7.1 WAR), and by ’92, he was still effective as the guy who handed the ball over to Ward.

Mike Timlin and David Weathers were on the ’92 roster--Timlin was actually on the mound for the final out of the World Series. Both guys were just beginning their careers in ’92, and neither was an integral part of the team: Weathers only pitched in two games, Timlin in 26. But what they did for the rest of their careers, bouncing around on a number of teams, is almost total 2,000 games between them. Timlin’s 1,058 GP ranks seventh on the career list, Weathers’ 964 ranks 18th.

There were only three guys on the ’92 staff whose careers amounted to nothing: Bob Macdonald, Doug Linton, and Ricky Trlicek. The other 14 guys who pitched for the Jays in 1992 included: 43 seasons of 4.0+ WAR pitching between their starters (44, if you include Eichhorn); arguably the second-best closer of his generation; another reliever who was almost as dominant as Roger Clemens or Dennis Eckersley for three seasons; two guys who rank very high on the career Games Pitched list; and Todd Stottlemyre, who won 138 games.

Back to those 4.0+ WAR seasons among the starters. I’m not sure if 43 is the highest figure ever recorded by one staff in history, but it may very well be. Here’s how the ’92 Jays compare to the 10 greatest pitching staffs ever assembled according to the Bleacher Report website, in a piece posted a couple of years ago. (Oddly enough, a list of 50 that includes not the ’92 Jays, but the ’93 team instead, at #28. Doesn’t make sense to me.)

1. 1995 Braves: 31 (26 from Maddux/Glavine/Smoltz)

2. 1971 Orioles: 12 (8 from Palmer, no one else more than one)

3. 1954 Indians: 25

4. 1966 Dodgers: 29 (some by relievers)

5. 2003 Yankees: 39 (3 from Mariano)

6. 1905 Athletics: 22

7. 1973 Athletics: 12

8. 1979 Orioles: 16

9. 1948 Indians:  18

10. 1978 Yankees: 21

Only one team comes anywhere close, the ’03 Yankees--but among starters only, the Jays lead 43-36. I’m not going to check all 50 staffs on the Bleacher Report list, so maybe there’s a team or two in there with more than the Jays.

I highly doubt it, though. In the midst of putting this together--I started a month ago, then put it aside for awhile--the subject of the ’92 Jays’ pitching depth came up in a comments thread on the excellent High Heat Stats baseball blog. Someone wondered how a team with so many well known pitchers ended up ninth in team ERA, followed by someone else pointing out that of the 199 pitchers since 1901 with a career WAR over 30, the ’92 Jays had more of them (seven) than any other team. Which is just one more indicator of something I’ve come to believe about the collection of pitching talent the Jays had that year: widening out from the ’92 season itself, no one ever had a deeper staff.

Calmly Disagreeing: Stanley Kauffmann (1916-2013) (2013)

When film critic Stanley Kauffmann died a few weeks ago, Scott was in the midst of a series of posts devoted to rock critics who, at some point in their careers, expressed a declining interest in writing about music. Did Kauffmann ever experience something similar, I wondered? He began at The New Republic in 1957, and he was still at it when he reviewed Our Nixon just prior to his death at the age of 97. That’s 50-plus years of writing film reviews for the same publication--it wouldn’t appear that he ever got bored of seeing and writing about movies, and I don’t recall him ever saying so in any of the interviews I’ve read with him (many of which are collected in Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann). But who knows? He did slow down considerably the past few years, sometimes only appearing in the magazine every couple of months. Maybe there was a moment in there, back when he was still only 93 or 94, where he stopped and thought, “This film reviewing thing, I’m not really sure if it’s for me.”

Kauffmann, as I’ve written many times before, influenced me almost as much as Pauline Kael. Or maybe his influence was every bit as great--it’s just easier to detect Kael when I look at stuff I’ve written. I can pick out little stylistic flourishes here and there, and in terms of her favourite films and directors, there’s overlap with my own favourites all over the place. If Kauffmann had a signature style when he wrote, something as instantly recognizable as Kael’s whirlwind advocacy (I know that’s a simplification, but I think it’s a fair description of the reviews she’s most famous for--Nashville, Last Tango, etc.), I’m not sure how you’d describe it. Whenever I’d mention him on the ILX message board, the general perception seemed to be that he was bookish and a little stodgy. Not John Simon, maybe, but another guy who came from some place that had an inherently supercilious attitude towards film--in Kauffmann’s case, from a background that included theatre criticism, book publishing, and even a few novels. And while there were a few directors he venerated for a time--Antonioni and Bergman in the ‘60s, and Oliver Stone at the beginning of his career, are the first three that come to mind--I don’t associate him with specific directors (Altman, De Palma, Peckinpah) or moments (American film during the ‘70s) the way I do Kael. I almost want to say that he especially kept the latter at arm’s length--as Kael rhapsodized over The Godfather and Jaws and Carrie, Kauffmann would instead devote his reviews to noticing small virtues in the likes of The Hired Hand and Desperate Characters, all the while writing much more skeptically about the era’s defining films--but again, a simplification. Sometimes, as with Close Encounters, Kauffmann rhapsodized, while Kael wrote admiringly of many smaller films.

Two paragraphs in, and I’m lost in explanations and clarifications. For whatever reason, I read and re-read Kauffmann’s collections incessantly for a time--he was one of those critics where I reached a point of needing to know what he thought about every film of interest to me. His key work for me is found in Figures of Light (covering the late ‘60s), Living Images (early ‘70s), Before My Eyes (mid-late ‘70s), and Field of View (early ‘80s); there’s also A World on Film, his first collection, where he discovers Bergman and Antonioni, and wades through the dying years of the Hollywood studio system, and Distinguishing Features, devoted to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I just realized now that I don’t own a copy of his final collection, Regarding Film: Criticism and Comment, which came out in 2005. Or maybe I should say latest, rather than final--I expect there’ll be another one collecting his last few years of reviews sometime soon. Anyway, I just put Regarding Film on order.

I never found Kauffmann’s writing bookish or stodgy; there was humour, curiosity, detours into personal anecdote, a thorough knowledge of film history (a history that unfolded right alongside his own life--someone pointed out that he was born the year after Birth of a Nation), an ability to connect film to the other arts that was never pedantic (Kael had that too), an ongoing willingness to re-see and re-evaluate (very different than Kael there), and a way with words that was lucid and spare and, to me as a reader--and I know this sounds odd--comfortable. I had a degree of comfort with Kauffmann’s reviews that I don’t think I’ve ever reached with another critic.

He was both a participant in the great film-critic free-for-alls of the 1960s--I always thought of him, Kael, Andrew Sarris, and John Simon as the epicenter of those battles, probably because of their ubiquity, with Manny Farber and Dwight Macdonald and everyone else kind of buzzing around at the edges--and also slightly removed. He didn’t snipe away with great glee like Simon (who has now outlived the other three, presumably good karma for a lifetime of gentle collegiality), but there are allusions to Kael and Sarris in his reviews--when he refers to “all the advance fuss” over Last Tango in Paris, he’s surely looking in one direction--and discussions of auteurism here and there. (Kauffmann wrote a review of Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies for Harper’s in 1965, but I’ve never read it, and it isn’t collected in any of his books.) He was hardly oblivious to the surrounding din, nor were the other three oblivious to him. Kael talks about Kauffmann a few different places; she seemed to be a little perplexed by him, and he and Macdonald and Simon represented one kind of film criticism she took on in the early ‘60s. (“I always thought that the reason Stanley Kauffmann and I so rarely agreed on things was clear if you looked at his measured walk versus my incautious quick steps”--which is probably just a nice way to say stodgy. Sometimes I like quick and incautious, more often I gravitate towards measured.) Somewhere, I can’t remember where, I recall reading Kauffmann taking a second look at auteurism--he was always taking a second look at things--and giving it credit for bringing to the fore certain films and directors that might otherwise have been forgotten; he’s also on record as saying that he missed the boat with the ‘60s great critical lightning rod, Godard. As acrimonious as the ‘60s and ‘70s could get among film critics, Kauffmann kept that acrimony out of his own reviews, and he didn’t seem to come out of that period with calcified views.

In trying to assemble a few excerpts that will capture Kauffmann at his sharpest, the challenge is that he doesn’t have those (in)famous reviews that Kael had, where you can go and immediately find what you’re looking for. Also, I internalized those aforementioned books long ago--I still refer to Kauffmann frequently, on ILX and elsewhere, but the only time I take him off the shelf these days is to see what he thought of some film I’ve caught up with for the first time.  So, with his books beside me, I’ll flip through and try to refresh my memory--starting, though, with the opening lines of one review I remember very well.

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

“I like sequels. At the end of Riders of the Purple Sage (1925), when Tom Mix and the girl were sealed up in the canyon, we were told to watch for the sequel, The Rainbow Trail. I did, and was glad of it.”

(The Godfather, Part II, 1975, which he liked a little more than The Godfather--but not by much.)

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

“Antonioni, however, seems to be making the miracle: finding a way to speak to us about ourselves today without crankily throwing away all that went before and without being bound by it. He is reshaping the idea of the content of film drama, discarding ancient and less ancient concepts, redirecting traditional audience expectations toward immersion in character rather than conflict of character. He is reshaping time itself in his films, taking it out of its customary synoptic form, wringing intensity out of its distension, daring to ask us to ‘live through’ experiences with less distillation, deriving his drama from the very texture of such experiences and their juxtaposition, rather than from formal clash and climax and resolution.”

(La Notte, 1962. I’m still finding my way with Antonioni, making progress here and there; I had read Kauffmann’s reviews many times before I saw most of the films.)

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

“Usually letters that disagree with my reviews do so in pretty angry and direct terms. I got a number of such letters about 2001, but I also got a quite unusual response: about two dozen very long letters, from four to eight typewritten pages, calmly disagreeing, generally sad but generally hopeful that I would eventually see the light. They came from widely scattered parts of the country, from students, a lawyer, a clergyman, a professor, and others. Most of those letters must have taken their authors a full day to compose and to type, and I felt that this disinterested, quite private support (none of the letters was sent for publication) was the best compliment that Kubrick could have been paid.”

(Postscript to his review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. I thought of this passage when one of ILX’s best film posters tried to reason with naysayers a couple of years ago over The Tree of Life--there was that same feeling of patient resignation verging on sadness.)

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

“Imperfections in Persona are few and therefore obtrusive. The moment, after the twice-told tale of the actress’s son--when half of one woman’s face is matched with half of the other’s--is heavy, superfluous. A photograph of German soldiers and Jewish civilians falls quite fortuitously out of a book to remind the actress of the world’s horror. The film is so fine that the fingers itch to tear out these and a few other blemishes.”

(Persona, 1966. As someone who once made the focus of a ten-favourite-albums piece my least favourite songs on each album, I can relate; interesting, too, that he chooses what is Persona’s single most recognizable image as one of its flaws.)

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

“The film is a whirlwind, a torrent. Its fierce main current, the Garrison story, sweeps along with attendant swirls and eddies. Stone keeps that story--and its references and hypotheses--as visible as possible, aiming at increased clarity rather than pyrotechnics, yet it is virtuoso work…Throughout the cascading film I kept wanting to see more, more, more--and it runs three hours.”

(JFK, 1992. I wanted to quote something from his Nixon review--putting my own wildly varying enthusiasm for Oliver Stone’s work aside, no one wrote better about Stone’s virtues than Kauffmann--but it must be collected in Regarding Film.)

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

“Finally, Raging Bull is ‘about’ what we see and hear, elevating its rather familiar materials through conviction and the gush of life. After the socio-psychological explanations have limped on, this film, like some (though not most) good art works, is finally ‘about’ the fact that it incontrovertibly exists and, by existing, moves us.”

(Raging Bull, 1980--against interpretation, in other words. Time for a new copy of Field of View, too; I can’t open mine even a little bit without more pages detaching themselves.)

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

“I saw Close Encounters at its first public showing in New York, and most of the audience stayed on and on to watch the credits crawl lengthily at the end. For one thing, under the credits the giant spaceship was returning to the stars. For another, they just didn’t want to leave this picture. For still another, they seemed to understand the importance of those many names to what they had just seen.”

(Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1978.)

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

“Two months ago I was driving down through the Grand Tetons and gave a lift to a young man. He turned out to be a Ph.D. candidate from an eastern university who had just finished his course work and couldn’t get up enough interest to write his dissertation. The whole process had turned futile on him. He had come out to Wyoming to get a job with his hands; he didn’t know how long it would be before he went back. Perhaps never. I thought of him when I saw Five Easy Pieces.”

(Five Easy Pieces, 1970--far and away my favourite review of one of my favourite films.)

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

I’ll stop there, but only because I’m lazy, and this is getting long enough already. I only occasionally read Kauffmann’s reviews these past few years--he almost exclusively wrote about small foreign films I knew I’d never see, by choice or otherwise. (The reviews were sometimes behind a paywall, too.) When he did write about something I was interested in, I can’t say I always found the results as rewarding as his work 30 years ago--the Our Nixon review consisted of little more than description. But I’m not really sure if you should expect a critic to be topping himself at 97, and there’s no real precedent for seeing how the work of other 97-year-old critics holds up. (George Bernard Shaw? I don’t know.) Maybe that Raging Bull quote provides rationale enough for those later reviews.

Stanley Kauffmann’s 10 favourite films from the 1972 Sight & Sound poll:

The Gold Rush
Battleship Potemkin
The General
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Grand Illusion
Citizen Kane
Rashomon
Tokyo Story
L’Avventura
Persona

(He again participated in 1982, dropping Citizen Kane and Rashomon for Seven Samurai and The Marquise of O…)

His list for James Monaco’s American Film Now of the best American films from 1968-77:

1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
2. The Conversation
3. Desperate Characters
4. Harlan County, U.S.A.
5. The Hired Hand
6. Midnight Cowboy
7. Mikey and Nicky
8. Payday
9. Wanda
10. The Wild Bunch

It's Really About Me Loving to Dance (2013)

2011 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “Driftin’ Back,” Neil Young & Crazy Horse: I hadn’t planned on buying Psychedelic Pill--hadn’t bought a Neil album close to its release date since Trans (not even Freedom or Ragged Glory, coming as they did after those Geffen monstrosities)--but I was in a used record store before a movie one night, and a couple of minutes of “Driftin’ Back” changed my mind. That’s as much as I had time to hear; I of course had no idea it went on for 27 minutes, and probably would have been less receptive if I had. Twenty-seven minutes is a lot of room for bad ideas to creep in, reminders that this is now and not then.

I’ve still only gotten through the rest of the album once (“Walk Like a Giant” goes right past me, except for the whistling, which I hate), but I played “Driftin’ Back” on endless loop for about three weeks in the car. I’d put it right up there with “Cowgirl” and “Cortez” and “Over and Over” as Neil’s greatest long-player ever. I was a little surprised when the Neil claque on I Love Music wasn’t as rapturous as I was. The lyrics seemed to be the issue, and indeed, the elliptical Neil of 1970 is long gone; “Driftin’ Back”’s litany of complaints is very specific and (to put it mildly) somewhat not in the here-and-now. You don’t, for instance, hear a great deal about the Maharishi these days, and those Apple ads were several lifetimes ago. I’m not sure what a hip-hop haircut is--Kid ‘n Play, maybe, I don’t know.

None of which is a problem for me. The words melt into everything else that’s going on, and I sing along happily. A song about drifting back ought to be a little random anyway--in the course of a day, my mind drifts back to stuff much sillier than the Maharishi. So I do understand.

2. “Take Care,” Drake & Rihanna: I like the Miguel and Frank Ocean songs I’ve heard, but I don’t think they have the pitch-perfect calm found here. I had to teach dance to my grade 6s this year, which basically amounts to a couple of classes spent twisting and frugging and hitchhiking, then they get into small groups and come up with their own dances. Four of my girls chose “Take Care” for their music, so thanks to them for making sure I didn’t miss this. I don’t have any more interest in Rihanna’s ongoing dramas than I did when I voted for “Cheers (Drink to That)” last year, no more than I once did in Madonna’s, or Mary J. Blige’s, or Eminem’s, or whoever’s. (Don’t mean to sound callous--I realize Rihanna’s were triggered by something qualitatively different.) But they’re there, on “Cheers” and again on “Take Care,” where her opening line (about knowing when people have been hurt by the way they carry themselves) seems made to order for Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor’s Faking It, which I finally got around to reading. Maybe that line was written specially for her, and maybe that’s the first thing most listeners will remember about this song, if they remember anything at all. But without the expert contribution of the Canadian childhood TV star she’s paired with (whose background seems eminently middle-class to me, although his Wikipedia entry tries hard to blur that), and especially without the studio hands who provide all the atmospherics, it’d just be words on a page that I probably wouldn’t even notice.

3. “New for U,” Andrés: As majestic a trance-out as “Driftin’ Back,” though you could fit five of these into one of those. No words to complicate things--well, two or three, over and over (“Time for love”?). If Neil and I didn’t have a history, I’d be happy to make Andrés my #1, and part of me thinks I’d do well to take a year off from every kind of music except stuff like this--which, far as I can tell, hasn’t changed a bit in 25 years, and hopefully never will.

4. “Pizza King,” Wussy: Not a good year for pizza kings. One wanted to be president (not really, just play along), but he had a past, and sometimes he’d forget his lines. A couple almost had their businesses run into the ground by a rogue Supreme Court justice and the selfishness of sick people. Another made it to the World Series, but ran into funny-looking round man and got swept in four games. No idea who Wussy are singing about, but well timed anyway.

5. “Inspector Norse,” Todd Terje: The wiseguy in me recognizes this as just an arted-up “Popcorn” (Hot Butter, 1972--we’re probably past the point where I can assume such a reference means anything), but there are also a bunch of little Mogwais running around in there who love pretty sounds in any configuration and just want to do the Stereolab. (Almost voted for Perfume’s “Point” for much the same reason.) The Mogwais always get final say.

6. “Don’t Know How You Do It,” Imperial Teen: I pretty much reserve a spot on my year-end lists for anything new by Wussy, Yo La Tengo, or Imperial Teen. I know that’s not how you’re supposed to do it, but seeing as I only vote for songs, invariably there’s one or two I love on every album, even when it's only one or two. So I hope all three keep keep at it forever, although, in Imperial Teen’s case, I suspect they’re at that sobering middle-ground stage--not old enough to be venerable, like Yo La Tengo, but neither still waiting around hopefully for someone outside of Robert Christgau’s comments section to notice, like Wussy--where they’re making music for me and a few thousand faithful.

7. “Sore Tummy,” Paws: The guitar at the beginning is right out of “You! Me! Dancing!”, and that’s a good place for any song to start. The rest is a sprightly diatribe against doctors who don’t know anything, all of it possibly connected to drug withdrawal. My favourite power-pop blog, Take the Pills, went under this year, so I’ll have to figure out some other way to keep up with the Cheap Tricks and the Big Stars.

8. “Blessed,” Schoolboy Q, and 9. “Ima Read,” Zebra Katz & Njena Reddd Foxxx: I won’t embarrass myself trying to grapple with these two songs the way I used to with “Fantastic Voyage” and “People Everyday”--if you’re a middle-aged white guy who’s out of the loop on this stuff, that would surely amount to high comedy in 2012. I did do a little reading on “Ima Read”’s backstory, and of course (I suspected as much) it’s not at all what it seems; it’s also the only song I think I’ve ever heard that mentions proofreading, and, having once spent two years proofreading Woolco-Woolworth’s advertising flyers, I’m very excited about that. “Blessed” has that beautifully forlorn little keyboard flourish (or sample, or something--I never know) the whole way through, so I whistle along with that and leave the words to Schoolboy Q. “Last of a dying breed,” says Schoolboy Q--perhaps. I won’t put my Top 10 on the blackboard this year the way I sometimes do. Eleven-year-olds do not gravitate towards backstories, and I don’t really want any parent phone-calls.

10. “Devastating Bones,” Shrag: Doubt I’d like this without the British accents--there’s a certain kind of song that depends on a British accent, and I think this is the first one I’ve voted for since “Stutter.” (There are many other kinds of songs where a British accent is like the ultimate red flag.) Not sure if I’m hearing correctly, but “I think you might need those knees for kneeling” is an excellent, vaguely disreputable line that makes me think of John McGiver in Midnight Cowboy.

Downgrade (2012)

The list is out. Yes, that one--the list.

I recounted my own history with Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade survey of the greatest films ever made when the 2002 list came out. (In a weird way, one of my favourite things I’ve ever participated in; the whole thing was set up by Scott Woods, and I didn’t know until the very last e-mail exchange that the guy I’d been sparring with, Andrew LaPointe, was 17. Still makes me laugh.) As indicated by the title of our exchange, 2002’s list represented something of a holding pattern. This year’s, less so--because the thing that many people thought might come to pass actually did, the 2012 list will make some news.

I’m basically indifferent to Vertigo’s ascension to #1. Given the choice between the two leading contenders, I’d much rather Citizen Kane had held down the top spot once again--for one thing, I’d still be able to announce to my students with a great dramatic flourish Kane’s half-century domination of the poll when I talk about Welles on his birthday next year--but seeing as I’ve made up many favourite-film lists of varying lengths over the years and not once put Kane on any of them, it’d be silly to get indignant. I’ve come to think of Vertigo as the On the Beach (Neil Young version) of the film canon; I’m convinced its stature owes at least something to the fact that it was long out of circulation, but I can also appreciate why its particular mood connects with people so deeply, even if I don’t share that connection myself.

The Godfather(s), which last time looked like they might make a bid for #1, are out (say the beginning and end of that sentence in your best Michael Corleone voice). Mostly that’s due to an accounting decision: last time, votes for the first two were added together, this time I and II were counted as separate films. If they’d stayed with their initial decision, the combined vote total for the two would have grazed the lower reaches of the Top 10, down from #4 in 2002. I started out very much in favour of treating the first two as a single film (which is how they come together in my own head), but now I’m closer to being on the fence. I can easily explain why I think it makes much more sense to combine votes for the first two Godfathers than for Kieślowski’s Three Colors Trilogy. I’d have a much tougher time trying to rationalize why it makes any more sense than to combine votes for all three Apu films, something I wouldn’t agree with.

So what makes me happy about this year’s results? I like that most--most, not all--of the hallowed names going back to when I was a film student 30 years ago still find their way into the Top 50 with at least one film. I’m like John McGiver in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: even though there are films on there I don’t personally get much out of (8-1/2 is always the first example I point to), it gives one a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past, that sort of thing. I like that The 400 Blows, which has become one of my favourite films the past few years, still does pretty well (33 votes, good for 39th), and that Persona is still hanging on. Taxi Driver tied for 31st (with Godfather II, coincidentally)--if I had to settle on one of the core Scorsese films to push ahead of the others, that’d be the one. And I like seeing films like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, Histoire(s) du cinema, and Andrei Rublev on there--strange films I would have once brushed aside with jokes and exasperation, but that now interest me a great deal. I still have a few more of those to catch up with. (Stalker, at #29, still inspires jokes and exasperation.)

My biggest disappointment would be the absence of Nashville in the Top 50. Altman’s the kind of director who splits votes among a few films, and my guess is that, in total, he exceeded the 29 votes necessary to finish 50th. But I’m surprised that Nashville still hasn’t emerged as the consensus choice, and surprised that Altman’s death, as death sometimes seems to, didn’t give it a little extra push. And, in keeping with my great interest in documentaries the past few years (on the wane somewhat), I guess I would have liked to have seen one or two of my favourites show up somewhere towards the bottom of the Top 50...well, that just wasn’t going to happen; thinking about the ones that mean the most to me, I’d be surprised if any of them got a single vote.

I may have some more to say when individual lists are printed (not until the print issue in September, it appears). I’ve refrained thus far from saying anything about Mulholland Dr. at #28. Let’s keep it that way.

Here's an ILX thread devoted to the poll, and also another. Elsewhere (not sure how long these links will remain valid): Scott Tobias, Ebert, David Edelstein, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dana Stevens, Armond White, Richard Brody, James Wolcott, Peter Bogdanovich, Owen Gleiberman, Steven Rubio.

I Hope Sister Hazel Will Remember (2012)

I've been collecting ballots this past week for a Neil Young poll I'm overseeing on the message board. A lot of my time has been spent searching the internet for suitable images--i.e., what does "Cowgirl in the Sand" look like? All of this has reminded me of how much I used to fuss over every Radio On cover; I cared almost as much about what the cover looked like as I did about what was inside. Here are covers for the first nine Radio Ons--there was a 10th issue put together by Jeff Pike and (if I remember correctly) Kate Lewis, but it was assembled loose-leaf and didn't really have a cover.

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)