Money Be Green (2016)

2015 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “I’m All Wrong,” Juan Wauters: In honor of Carly Simon finally putting to rest a 40-year-old mystery everybody had already figured out anyway--if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re living very much in the here and now, and good for you--this is the most singer-songwriterly record I’ve ever voted #1. The version in the great Bela Tarr-like video (“Of course, the people are all wrong for Bela Tarr, aren’t they?”) doesn’t have the second guitar snaking around in the background that for me elevates it from a good song to a great one, something in the neighborhood of the Velvets’ “Some Kinda Love.” The awkward plain-spokenness of the opening line (“Like a movie that is good/You require my attention”) makes me wince and smile at the same time. I think they should reshoot the video, keeping everything the same but making room on the bike for the second guitar player.

2. “What’d You Say?” Go! Team: I liked “Grip Like a Vice” from a few years ago, but it also felt like of one of those complicated hippety-hoppity art projects out of Britain that I don’t naturally gravitate to. This is plain old pop music, immediately accessible, ebullient and pixilated. No idea what they’re singing about, or how such a mundane question could inspire such happiness.

3. “Alagarta,” Niagara: Or maybe it’s “Niagara” by Alagarta, how should I know? Todd Terje’s “Inspector Norse” is my favorite song of the decade halfway through, so I’m very receptive to anything that catches some of that feeling. This isn’t epic like Terje’s song, but it bubbles along with the same kind of herky-jerky melodicism.

4. “Classic Man,” Jidenna: I came close to voting for Leon Bridges’ “Coming Home,” the kind of careful, deferential attempt to recreate a classic ‘60s soul record that almost always leaves me cold. That one’s just about perfect, though, especially the vocal. “Classic Man” sort of comes from the same place, but it’s got polygamy, hygiene, leprechauns, Nat King Cole, and swear words--it’s not especially deferential. The title seems to use “classic” in a decidedly pejorative sense. “I can pull the wool when I’m being polite”--I hear a liar and a con artist there who’s very much aware of his machinations.

5. “Summertime,” Magic Words, and 7. “Vacation,” Florist: I wish country music sounded like this, and somewhere along the line, I think some of it did. I’ll count the Magic Words song as keeping my streak of voting for Wussy intact at six years and counting, even if I’m a little hazy on the relationship between the two (Lisa Walker, I know, but why do Wussy songs turn up on Magic Words records?). The singer in Florist broods about some of the same things I do: she’s half my age, asks good questions*, and appears to be a lot closer to figuring out answers than I am.

6. “Fuckin’ Up the Count,” Freddie Gibbs: I hear maybe one-tenth of one percent of the hip-hop that’s out there right now, so to say I’m disengaged would be something of an understatement. I was interested in where hip-hop would go during Obama’s tenure, and now that he’s about to leave, I’ve completely lost the plot and have no sense of that. “Fuckin’ Up the Count” checks some of the same boxes that Lil Wayne’s “Upgrade Me” checked for me eight years ago--druggy, profane, a kind of mournful slow-motion death march--so nothing seems to have changed much for me personally in terms of what kind of hip-hop is most liable to reach me. Obviously, in the news, not a great year to be black, and in my own little world, I’m not helping matters (i.e., middle-school black students, especially boys, are not as accommodating when it comes to the stubborn, autocratic ways of a 54-year-old white middle-school teacher as their non-black counterparts are). When I returned to school this year in September, right after Sandra Bland, I wanted to ask one of my students from last year, a girl who keeps right on top of the news and thinks about such stories very thoughtfully, if, to some of her friends, I was basically the cop in that video. I didn’t: wasn’t sure if that was an unfair question, and I knew the answer anyway.

8. “The Glass City,” Pender Street Steppers: Terrible name--reminds me of the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and “Zoot Suit Riot.” Great driving music, like the Marshall Tucker Band (“Of course, the people are all wrong for Marshall Tucker, aren’t they?”), highly recommended to the woman in Florist as a good way to forget all those troublesome questions.

9. “N.M.S.S.,” Elvis Depressedly: Good name, or at least as good as Thelonius Monster. I’ve been conducting an informal Elvis Watch among my grade-school students the past 20 years, and every year fewer hands go up when I ask “Who’s heard of Elvis Presley?” on his birthday. I’m down to maybe a quarter of the class now--there are even fewer who’ve seen E.T., though, so maybe he’s not doing so bad (“homework” also fares poorly these days). This year, looking at the Warhol Elvis print I have hanging on the wall, I even had a student ask a) if I’d painted it, and b) if it was me in the painting. Elvis Depressedly confronts one of the most pressing issues of our time, the need for an answer song to the mid-‘80s hits of Billy Ocean and Elton John. Big surprise, the title’s a ruse--they sound very sad.

10. “Comme Ça,” Domenique Dumont: Came down to this, Diet Cig’s “Breathless,” or Justin Bieber’s “What Do You Mean” for the 10th spot. Diet Cig would be the obvious choice for me--this year (#s 5, 7, and 8) and every year, I seem to be forever pretending it’s 1994--but I’m trying to get outside my comfort zone a bit. I thought “What Do You Mean” might end up being my #1 for the year the first few times I heard it, and it’s been very durable--still sounds great. I’m too Elvis Depressedly most of the time these days to feel any connection to the world of big hits, though, and for that and other reasons I don’t need or want to get into here, I’d prefer to keep that stuff off my list. (The Weeknd’s “Earned It,” Pitbull and Ne-Yo’s “Time of Our Lives,” and even Adele’s “Hello” were also in the running.) The austere, anonymous beauty of “Comme Ça” lets me off the hook--I don’t have to think about 1994, about big hits, or about anything.

*Some years ago, I read a film piece where somebody attacked somebody else for his sloppy command of detail--“impressionistic” film criticism was the charge, I think, where accuracy and precision give way to a general sense of what happened in the film being described. The writer then went on to catalog a number of factual errors in the other critic’s account/analysis of a particular scene. Guilty as charged. I was listening to “Vacation” in the car today, and I counted the number of questions asked by the singer; exactly zero, it turns out. What she actually does is equivocate a lot, just like I do, and because of that, the entire song ends up sounding like one big question to me. I’m quite sure I make mistakes like that all the time. 

Some Daylight (2015)

A couple of months ago, Darren Shred was taken by the Cincinnati Reds in the 22nd round of this year’s amateur draft, the 655th player selected overall. This is the first and last time I’ll ever be able to say this: I coached Darren for three years at Huttonville P.S., the school I’ve been at since I started teaching full-time in 1998. By “coached,” I mean that we picked him for the school team, got out of his way as quickly as possible, then stood back and watched him launch baseballs over the far portables. There wasn’t a whole lot that I or the other coaches could tell him. “Way to go, Darren--now don’t get hurt, and don’t go on vacation.” In his final year in grade 8, we won our annual tournament for the one and only time.

That’s about as much as I can or should write about Darren’s time at Huttonville--it’s not something teachers should do, and on the thousand-to-one shot he ever stumbles over this, I’m quite sure he doesn’t want to be reading a former grade-school-coach’s thoughts online (least of all when the coach was also his grade 6 teacher). I have, though, become very interested in what Darren’s chances of making it to the majors are from such a relatively low perch in the draft. There were 40 rounds this year, with a total of 1215 players selected, putting him a little past the halfway mark. How often does a 22nd-round pick go on to get in some time at the major-league level? Thanks to Baseball Reference.com, where’s there’s an extensive year-by-year rundown of the draft going back to the beginning, that’s something that can be researched and quantified very easily.

I went back and looked at all the 22nd-round picks since the very first one in 1965. I used 2009’s draft as the cut-off mark--anyone drafted after 2009, especially a lower pick, hasn’t really had a chance to find his way yet (although a couple of post-2009 picks have in fact reached the majors already). So that’s 45 years’ worth of data to go by.

Short version: the chances of a 22nd-round pick reaching the majors are not great--not hopeless, by any means, but Darren has an uphill slog ahead of him. Some numbers:

Total Players Drafted in the 22nd round: 1194

Total Players Who Reached the Majors: 92 (7.7%)

Position Players Who Reached the Majors: 43

Pitchers Who Reached the Majors: 49

That works out almost exactly to a one-in-thirteen shot. If you’re drafted as a pitcher, as Darren was, your odds are a little better of making it to the majors--and, by a much wider margin, of achieving some success when you get there.

Total WAR for the 92 22nd-round Picks Who Made the Majors: 360.1

Total WAR for Position Players: 70.1

Total WAR for Pitchers: 290.0

WAR, if you don’t know, is an approximation of how many wins a player is worth to his team above and beyond what a replacement-level player might provide (i.e., somebody you stick in there simply because you have nobody better). It’s a metric that has been debated endlessly the past few years, but it’s gradually becoming less contentious--as an easy summation of a player’s value, it’s useful.

Over 45 years of drafting, that’s not a lot of value coming from the 22nd round: about 4 career wins for the 92 players who made it to the majors, and only about a third of a career win for the 1194 players drafted. Pitchers fare much better--their 290 WAR is four times as great as the 70 generated by position players. Almost half of that belongs to two pitchers, though, so that’s a bit misleading.

Most Successful Draft by Number of Players: 1975 (5)

Most Successful Draft by Total WAR: 1985 (69.6)

Least Successful Drafts: 1979, 1980, 1981, 2003, 2004 (135 players drafted, none made it to majors)

Again, almost all of 1985’s 69.6 WAR is attributable to one player. The ’75 group included only one player of any consequence. The five years that were complete washouts, especially the three in a row...might have been a few scouts lose their jobs around that time. (I wonder if the ’79-81 run had anything to do with the success of the ’77-78 Yankees, who won two World Series in a row and were the first example of a team in the free-agency era that won by simply buying up everything in sight. Maybe there was a momentarily declining belief in the draft as a gateway to success, especially via the lower rounds.)

Getting down to specifics, here are the 10 best (as measured by career WAR) 22nd round picks. I was originally going to list the 10 best position players and 10 best pitchers separately, but these are the only 10 from either group who exceeded 10 WAR for their careers, so I’ve combined them into one tidy group.

1. John Smoltz (69.5 career WAR; drafted 1985): the one 22nd-round pick in the HOF. How was it that a player of such caliber was overlooked? I took a look at his minor-league record, and it seems clear that he took a few years to develop into John Smoltz; his strikeout rate was fairly low as a 19- and 20-year old, and it was only at 21 that he exceeded 7.0 for the first time. Drafted by the Tigers (seemingly a favorite-son pick--he attended Lansing High, about 100 miles northwest of Detroit), Smoltz was involved in one of the most famous late-season trades ever, one that was brought up frequently when the Jays recently acquired David Price for Daniel Norris. I can’t think of another trade that resulted in such immediate and spectacular short-term success for one team--the Tigers got Doyle Alexander, who proceeded to go 9-0 down the stretch with a 1.53 ERA, leading them past the Jays and into the playoffs--while the other, the Braves, received all the career value and then some. They got John Smoltz. The Tigers missed the World Series in ’87, losing the ALCS to an inferior Twins team (the Jays, of course, were better than both), and after a so-so year in ’88, Alexander would retire in 1989. (Update: the explanation as to why he was drafted so low turns out to be very simple. From the Cliff Corcoran piece linked to below: "Before the 1985 draft Smoltz signed a letter of intent to play baseball [and try basketball] at Michigan State. Without it, Sickels estimates that Smoltz would have gone in the first five rounds.")

2. Andy Pettitte (60.8, 1990): the borderline HOF case--he may get put in by one of the veteran’s committees one day, but that won’t be for a while. Finished Top 10 in Cy Young voting five times, and the key holdover starter for all four of the millennial Yankees WS winners.

3. Jason Bay (24.3, 2000): Rookie of the Year in 2004, drew MVP votes three times, and the one Canadian in the Top 10. Went to the Red Sox in a big three-way trade involving Manny Ramirez in 2008, at a point where his career was in very good shape. Followed up with a big year in 2009, and that was it--retired four years later at 34.

4. Freddie Patek (24.1, 1965): Key part--defensively, anyway--of the great Royals teams of the ‘70s. Famously short (5’5”), 41 career HR, three of them improbably in one game. Never won a Gold Glove--they all went to Belanger in the ‘70s.

5. Jeff Fassero (24.1, 1984): I remember him from his time as an Expo in the early-‘90s--he was pretty great there his first four seasons--and he followed up with one strong year in Seattle (9th–place in that year’s Cy Young voting). Like all left-handers, he then hung around as a journeyman middle reliever until he was 67.

6. Bill Lee (22.2, 1968): I’m quite sure the Red Sox hadn’t the slightest clue what was in store for them when they called his name. (Lee completely contradicts my statement about left-handers: I’m surprised to see that he only played for two teams and was out of the game at 35.)

7. Aaron Harang (20.4, 1996): Still at it, taking his regular turn in the rotation for the awful Phillies, his eighth team. Finished fourth in Cy Young voting for the 2006 Reds.

8. Dave Rozema (15.9, 1974): I remembered that he was a Tiger, but I had the wrong era. I thought he was part of the lousy run of mid-‘70s teams, the Fidrych and Wockenfuss and LeFlore years, but in fact he came along a little later, just as the great ‘80s teams were starting to be assembled. Top 10 Cy Young finisher in his rookie year, still hanging on as the 5th starter for the ’84 team that won 104 games and the World Series.

9. Jeff Nelson (15.2, 1984): Also an important part of the millennial Yankees dynasty as the right-handed set-up guy for Rivera. Not much control, but struck out more than a man- per-inning from 1996-2000, when that wasn’t nearly as common as it is today.

10. Ron Hassey (14.7, 1975): Another Jays connection: it was Hassey who lofted the fly ball that George Bell caught for the final out in the Jays’ first-ever division-clinching game in 1985. Quite a good hitter at the time, but that only lasted for three or four seasons.

A few other players of note:

Ron Bryant (drafted 1965): won 24 games for the Giants in ’73.

Ron Musselman (1975): part of that ’85 Jays team.

Chris Bando (1977): Salvatore’s brother.

Mark Davis (1978): one of the more dubious Cy Young winners ever (1989 with the Padres, for a year that’s replicated by about six closers every season now).

Mike Fetters (1983): another middle reliever who pitched forever, right-handed version. I vaguely remember that he looked like he should have been in the Little Rascals.

Kevin Maas (1986): Babe Ruth for a day. In 1990, Maas (then 25 years old) got called up by the Yankees in June and proceeded to hit 21 HR in 254 AB; he was runner-up to Sandy Alomar in ROY voting that year, and--during the heyday of card-collecting--his rookie cards were bought and sold like they were IBM stock. (Partly a function of being with the Yankees.) He hit 22 the next year, but in twice as many AB, and was finished by the time he was 30.

Mike Glavine (1995): Tom’s brother.

Jaime Garcia (2005): still in the Cardinals' rotation--very good pitcher when he’s healthy, never seems to be able to stay that way (starting with Tommy John surgery after his rookie year).

Again: not hopeless, not easy. I’m quite sure Darren knows this. One in 13 gives you much better odds than winning the lottery, and the payoff--at least if you’re John Smoltz (an estimated $135 million in career earnings) or Andy Pettitte ($140 million); even Jaime Garcia has earned over $25 million thus far, and he’s still only 30--can be almost as lucrative.

Here’s a good rundown of the best low-round picks from any round (Glavine and Pettitte both make the list):

The 10 Best Late-Round Draft Picks Ever, Led by Mike Piazza, and a New Way to Measure Them

Two Bright Shining Moments (2015)

This is a follow-up of sorts to something I posted last year about Philip Seymour Hoffman and Dylan Farrow--with Hoffman, the weird tendency of people to overdramatize celebrity death on social media (“I’m devastated by this” and such), and with Farrow, the even more distressing tendency of people getting really nasty in the middle of social-media discussions when somebody says something they don’t like, or even says something seemingly reasonable in not exactly the right way (“Go fuck yourself” and such). The big Kim Fowley story that came out last week--that he raped Jackie Fox when she was 15 and one of the Runaways--has underlined something else I hate about social media: that one of the most interesting conversations you can have, the reality that sometimes horrible people make great art, is now deemed impermissible by some people, and how really upset they get if you even broach the subject.

Kim Fowley never made great art, not even close (the Runaways included). And if you’d ever seen him interviewed before this story broke, say in the Rodney Bingenheimer documentary from a few years ago (or even in the way Michael Shannon portrayed him in the Runaways movie), you already knew there was something really creepy about him. But when he died last year, you had a lot of people making note of his death on social media, and while (happily) avoiding the melodramatics that attach to someone like Hoffman’s death, what they said was usually positive--basically that this really odd character had some interesting connections to pop-music history.

In a Runaways thread on ILM, there has been the expected and understandable dismay over the Huffington Post story. In the middle of that, one guy posted the following: “He was involved in some cool things/made some good stuff happen. He was also abusive and cruel and fairly evil. These are not mutually exclusive.” Seems fairly self-evident to me.

But, it was quickly made clear, no one wanted to hear that. I’ve seen the same closing-off-the-conversation occur with regards to Bill Cosby, to Woody Allen, to Roman Polanski. And I don’t know why people want to shut down that subject; it’s complicated and endlessly interesting. I’ve been reading (for the first time) Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation recently, where she writes about Leni Reifenstahl. That’s worlds away from Kim Fowley, but she basically makes the same point as the ILM poster above. I believe--I think it was Sontag--she later changed her mind on this, and wrote a long piece saying she could no longer separate Riefenstahl’s actions (or non-actions, as the case may be) from her films. But she did grapple with the question--she didn’t shy away from it.

You can’t do that on social media, or at least you can’t do it for very long. At some point, someone’s going to shame you for even bringing the subject up. Someone’s going to tell you to go fuck yourself, more or less.

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

Second verse, same as the first, so I'll just continue this post rather than put up a new one.

I should clarify something. I applaud Sontag for grappling with the question of awful-person/great-art at the same time as I (implicitly here, explicitly in the Hoffman/Farrow post a few months back) say I avoid posting on such ILX threads myself as much as possible. Again, it's not the issue I'm ducking, it's the mindset that takes over such threads. There are people who jump on to do two things: 1) Fish for "OTM"s and all that nonsense. I think of that Seinfeld I often quote, the one where George explains why he's ogling his boss's teenage daughter: "What am I, trying to win some award here?" I swear there are people who post on message boards about contentious issues who are looking for some kind of award. 2) They're also looking for someone to pounce on, and I'm going to be exactly the kind of person who'll supply them with just what they're looking for. I've got very much a gray-area way of looking at things; at some point I'm going to shrug my shoulders, say something like "It's complicated," and it'll go from there. And again, a clarification: the gray-area in the Fowley story is not what he did, which is obviously reprehensible (and which I take as such a given, I don't find a bunch of people saying so to be particularly interesting), it's in what that poster above said: “He was involved in some cool things/made some good stuff happen. He was also abusive and cruel and fairly evil. These are not mutually exclusive.”

More social media stuff ("Social media makes everything unbearable, but I'm not sure why" Jeff Pike e-mailed me recently). There's an ILX poster who now writes for Gawker. I know very little about the new kind of Gawker/Buzzfeed site that makes so much news these days. I'm not completely oblivious--I think it was Gawker that was in the middle of the Rob Ford story, and I certainly followed that--but I only occasionally end up on one of them via a link from somewhere else. Anyway, he posted a story concerning Timothy Geithner's brother the other day that has caused a major uproar and almost universal condemnation. You can Google the details very easily. I won't lie: this poster was always one of my least favourite on ILX. He was constantly jumping into the middle of arguments and directing his particular brand of smarm at one of the parties involved, invariably, it seemed to me, whichever side seemed more vulnerable. He did that to me on at least one occasion; I remember him doing it to someone else, and I took the time to e-mail that guy off-board and say something like, "Don't pay any mind--he does that stuff with everyone." So, I have to say, I'm very much enjoying his current vilification.

But I also know this is schadenfruede with a shelf life. Everything I dislike about him on ILX, and everything creepy and sordid having to do with his role in this latest episode, is perfectly in sync with the times. He'll make out just fine.

Hearing Something Else (2015)

March break. I thought about going to Europe, but I stayed home and made a list instead.

1. “My Favorite Things,” John Coltrane (1961, 13:43)

2. “Cowgirl in the Sand,” Neil Young & Crazy Horse (1969, 10:06)

3. “Desolation Row,” Bob Dylan (1965, 11:23)

4. “When,” Grachan Moncur III (1969, 12:08)

5. “Beat Bop,” Rammellzee vs. K-Rob (1983, 10:09)

6. “Marquee Moon,” Television (1977, 10:47)

7. “Spiegel im Spiegel,” Arvo Pärt (1995, 10:38)

8. “Jamboree,” Henry Flynt (1965, 10:18)

9. “I Love Music,” O’Jays (1975, 11:54)

10. “International Airport,” Dump (1995, 12:45)

11. “Driftin' Back,” Neil Young & Crazy Horse (2012, 27:36)

12. “Quiet Nervousness,” Manuel Göttsching (1984, 13:00)

13. “Jenny Ondioline,” Stereolab (1993, 18:08)

14. “A Very Cellular Song,” Incredible String Band (1968, 13:13)

15. “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now,” McFadden & Whitehead (1979, 10:37)

16. “Dark Star,” Grateful Dead (1969, 23:18)

17. “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” Pharoah Sanders (1969, 32:46)

18. “Für Immer,” Neu! (1973, 11:17)

19. “Right Off,” Miles Davis (1971, 26:53)

20. “Blue Sky, Highway and Thyme,” Henry Flynt (1965, 15:53)

21. “Out of This World,” John Coltrane (1962, 14:06)

22. “McCauley Street (Let's Go Downtown),” Chris Stamey Experience (2004, 10:40)

23. “Rapper's Delight,” Sugarhill Gang (1979, 14:35)

24. “Sending Lady Load,” Felt (1988, 11:59)

25. “The World Is a Ghetto,” War (1972, 10:10)

These are my favourite long songs, “long” defined as 10-minutes+ in an ILM poll running right now (called “Still Not an Epics Poll” for some reason, one of many ILM jokes that goes right over my head). The guy in charge of the poll has been vigilant about the 10-minute cut-off (happily; you have to draw the line somewhere), but for some reason, Television’s “Marquee Moon” was allowed to sneak in. It runs either 9:58 (according to Wikipedia, and according to my vinyl copy) or 9:11 (according to the mp3 I keep on my hard drive), but short of 10 minutes regardless. And it might win.*

Of my first eight, six of them were on the Facebook countdown I did with Scott Woods a few years back. “Beat Bop” wasn’t (it was on Scott’s list), and even at the time I wished I’d listed it too. I can’t remember if we had a strict no-duplicate-songs rule in place, or if that was more of an informal goal. The other omission was “Desolation Row”; I did have a no-artist-twice rule for my own list, and went with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” for Dylan. Today my pick would be one of my two other favourite songs on Highway 61, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” or “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”

Newest songs on the list (i.e., newest to me--these are all old songs that I heard for the first time within the past five years or so): “Beat Bop,” “When,” “Spiegel im Spiegel,” “International Airport,” “Quiet Nervousness,” “Für Immer,” “Right Off,” and “Let’s Go Downtown.” (And “Driftin’ Back,” but that one actually is new.) Also, until this poll, I never knew there was a much longer album version of War’s “The World Is a Ghetto.” If ever a Top 40 hit was meant to exist in a long version, you would think “The World Is a Ghetto”--hazy, mournful, druggy--would make the transition with ease. As of now, I still prefer the shorter hit version, though, but it’s brilliant enough that I wanted to vote for it anyway.

A couple of things that slipped my mind when I submitted my ballot last week: something by Ravi Shankar (I’ve got four songs of his on my hard drive that are over 10 minutes; two or three might be sections of a side-long suite) and the long piece of accordion music that plays during the pub scene in Satantango. The first might not have qualified under the rules--there was some disagreement about where classical ends and not-classical begins--and the second, well, I don’t even know if it has a name. If I’d remembered, I would have dubbed it “Love Theme from Satantango” and dropped it in around #20.

I’m too lazy to do the math, but I’d estimate that my list adds up to somewhere around 300 minutes--25 songs, 5 hours, with the longest being “Driftin’ Back” at 27:36. (“The Creator Has a Master Plan” is longer if you count Part 1 and 2 as a whole, but on the original LP they’re split up over two sides.) The Angry Samoans’ Unboxed Set, a single- CD collection of their first four albums, has 43 songs and runs just over 75 minutes. One of our focuses for math this year is “proportional reasoning.” There might be a good word problem in there.

*(I downloaded a new mp3 of “Marquee Moon” from Soulseek, and this one clocks in at 10:47. So I don't know what’s going on.)

It's Like It's Always Right Now (2015)

Putting together a year-end film list is pretty easy for me. 1) I keep up with most of what I want to see in any given year as the films come out. There’s sometimes a bit of a backlog around Christmas, maybe four or five late releases I want to catch up with. Not always--this year, Inherent Vice is the only thing that I know I need to see. (Rather optimistic, seeing as I haven’t unreservedly loved a Paul Thomas Anderson film since Boogie Nights. But there’s always that chance.) 2) There’s an ILX thread called “Last (x) movies you saw” that functions as a running log of whatever I see throughout the year--new releases, DVDs, everything--and I’m able to search back through that for a pretty complete list. Occasionally something will slip through-- I wrote a bit about Particle Fever on ILX’s running documentary thread, but for some reason didn’t mention it on the “Last (x)” thread. Also, like most people who post there, I attach ratings to what I see, so I can use it as a rough guide to how I felt about the films.

 1. Boyhood

 2. Particle Fever

 3. Citizenfour

 4. Regarding Susan Sontag

 5. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step

 6. The Dog

 7. National Gallery

 8. Finding Vivian Maier

 9. Beyond Clueless

10. Guidelines

11. A Most Wanted Man

12. We Are the Best!

13. The Double

14. The Unknown Known

15. Concerning Violence

16. Gone Girl

17. Palo Alto

18. Mugshot

19. Altman

20. Only Lovers Left Alive

I seem to have seen between 30 and 35 new films this year, about my usual number. I think last year’s list was a little stronger than this year’s. I feel about equally enthusiastic about my two #1s--Room 237 in 2013, Boyhood this year--although Boyhood will probably become part of film history, while Room 237 is largely forgotten. Boyhood is about as predictable a #1 as any film of the past few years. I’ve got to put it there, though; it’s the film that most affected me this year, and the one I’ve thought about the most.

My ILX ratings for the 20 films I’ve listed ranged from a low of 6.5 for Palo Alto (which seems a little better in retrospect...its mood lingers) to 8.5 for Boyhood. Actually, I gave Boyhood 7.5 the first time I saw it, then moved that up after a second viewing. The ratings are very general. If a film holds my interest and is reasonably well done, I give it a 6.5 or 7.0. Anything I really like gets 8.0 or higher. The 10.0s I give out during the year are all old favourites from previous years. Looking at the full list of 30+, the only thing I really hated this year was Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. I gave that a rating of “ordeal.” The rest of what I saw:

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, Ida, Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, Fed Up, Citizen Koch, Begin Again, Rich Hill, Goodbye to Language, Nightcrawler, St Vincent, Mock-Ups in Close-Up: Architectural Models in Film.

Parts Unknown (2015)

2014 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “Down on My Luck,” Vic Mensa: He’s lost in the town, wiping fog out of his eyes, Wednesday morning comin’ down. I checked a lyrics page on this--its video captures the vertiginous rabbit-hole of getting drunk as well as Harvey Keitel and “Rubber Biscuit” in Mean Streets, or the 10-minute accordion hootenanny in Satantango (with a spiralling, house-of-mirrors narrative out of Tarantino or Christopher Nolan), and I wanted to see if the song was literally about the same. No--the club just happens to be where down-on-his-luck Vic Mensa ends up, brooding about what seems to be the illusions of some woman he was in love with, illusions he’s seen through (“Ooooh, look at you, look at you”--meant for her, but in the video timed perfectly to the moment where he gets cuffed). Twice everything stops for a few seconds of P.M. Dawn. Only three-and-a-half minutes, but feels as majestic and as epic as Rhythim Is Rhythim’s “Strings of Life.”

2. “How Can You Really,” Foxygen: A friend tried to get me interested in Foxygen a couple of years ago; I listened to parts of two or three songs, and that was that for Foxygen. They evidently went back to the records they study--Something/Anything being the most obvious example, but I’m sure there are lots more (Ringo Starr’s “Photograph” seems to make a brief cameo appearance)--and this time they pass the blindfold test: “How Can You Really” approximates a kind of ephemeral early-‘70s sound I carry around in my head quite brilliantly. Ephemeral’s the best I can do; I’ve always found it difficult to articulate that sound when writing about Something/Anything, or the even-better Ballad of Todd Rundgren, which I’d never heard till a couple of years ago, and there may be an extra layer or two of irony and distance here, and that gets me tangled up even more. If the great video means anything (must be the first year in ages where two videos influenced my list), I don’t think so--the singer looks to be completely in the moment as he frolics around in his glam costume, quite excited to have just invented rock-star glamour.

3. “Something About Geography,” Chumped: Minor variations on a song I’ve heard and loved a million times before. (Or I’ll pretend there are, anyway--don’t ask me to actually identify the variations.) It’s funny and a little sad when they modestly drop a “fuck” in there--the word was probably startling coming from Grace Slick in 1969, and it still seemed worthy of attention when Bikini Kill and Liz Phair and She Mob sang it 20 years ago, but today it amounts to a Nicki Minaj clean version. I have a theory about difficult students, that if you’ve got one who’s really tough and suddenly a new kid even worse joins your class partway through the year, the first kid looks over at the new one and says “I can’t keep up with that,” after which he just retreats.

4. “Halloween,” Wussy: Wussy’s at the same disadvantage that Yo La Tengo was on my ballot last year: a lot of the stuff I end up listing I don’t hear until I catch up in December, whereas I’ll fixate on a certain Wussy or Yo La Tengo song much earlier and wear it out by the time Pazz and Jop happens. “Halloween” was far and away my most played song this year--it’s one of five on Attica I love, along with “Teenage Wasteland,” “North Sea Girls,” “Home,” and “Beautiful.” In September, to start the school year, I set up a bulletin board in my classroom that was loosely based on Rick Perlstein’s Invisible Bridge, with images of Nixon and Patty Hearst and the famous Ted Landsmark bussing-riot photo; for text, I put up the opening lines from “Beautiful.” “Halloween,” meanwhile, melted into Boyhood, which I saw twice and have been thinking about ever since. I think this is probably their second-greatest song; I doubt that they’ll ever top “Airborne.” It would seem they’re going to finally do pretty well in Pazz & Jop. I’ve spent the past few years wondering why they got so little attention beyond Christgau, now I’m a little tired of reading about them. (Being part of the Expert Witness group on Facebook doesn’t help.) The first three words on Attica are “Do you remember?”, and no one talks driftin’-back like Wussy right now. I especially appreciate that some of their reference points are as clunky as mine.

5. “Archie, Marry Me,” Alvvays: Not as good as “Wedding Bell Blues,” which would be close to impossible; better than “Chapel of Love,” though. Does anyone ever name their kid Archie anymore? Did anyone ever name their kid Archie? I can only think of four Archies in the entire history of the universe: Archie Bunker, Archie Moore, comic-book Archie, and Archie Holmes, a Scottish guy who lived on our street when I was a kid. He was short, Scottish, and had red hair and a thick accent. I still remember him walking around with a big grin on his face and a drink in hand, in shorts and a loud patterned shirt of some kind, during a street party our first or second year in Georgetown, ’68 or ‘69. If the Alvvays’ Archie had been that Archie, he’d have been pretty much ready to marry anyone, even though he already was. The song on this list that does the best job of making me sad.

6. “2 Is 8,” Lone: I’ve really come to love and seek out these little snippets of ambient serenity I’ve been voting for the past few years. Some are dancey (“Inspector Norse”), some sort of industrial (No Age); some are stately (Boards of Canada), some, like “2 Is 8,” bubble along; Yo La Tengo’s “The Fireside” is an extremely lengthy snippet, but I’ll throw that in too. As Chris Penn says in Reservoir Dogs, that’s the beauty of it, we’ve got little snippets of ambient serenity all over the place.

7. “Superstitious,” Elisa Ambrogio: Listen to the girl, as she takes on half the world, Bill Murray whispers, Scarlett Johansson listens, Japan, neon, echo, whisper, chord, echo, etc., etc.

8. “Six Ways to Sunday,” Purling Hiss: Rambling guitar reverie. The five minutes where they sing is fine, and I yelp along (making up my own words, because I can’t decipher much beyond the title: “Hollywoooo-oooooo-ood/How do you do?”); the two minutes where they don’t is better, and then they come back at the end and sing some more. In a rare show of restraint, I won’t name-check the guy who invented this kind of thing.

9. “Don’t Let It Go,” Beck: You would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago. (I used that line earlier this year on Facebook in connection to someone else. It’s a great line.) Beck seemed lost and mopey 12 years ago when he put out Sea Change; my Top 10 in 2002 was exceptionally strong, with “Work It” and “When the Last Time” and “Fell and Love with a Girl,” and I almost voted for Beck’s “All in Your Mind” in the midst of all that, in part because I found it touching how much of a ghost he felt like back then. I lost track of him after that--I think there was a record a couple of years ago where there was no record, you instead paid some money to a website in South America and he came over to your house and sang some new songs to you. He’s six times mopier and more lost on “Don’t Let It Go” than he was 12 years ago, which suits both him and me fine.

10. “Boss Ass Bitch,” Nicki Minaj: “Pussy this, pussy that”--as Chris Penn says in Reservoir Dogs, that’s the beauty of it, we’ve got pussy all over the place. Tinashe’s “2 On” just missed this list, and that’s got a touching cameo by Schoolboy Q about pussy-in-my-mouth; also almost voted for Perfect Pussy’s “Interference Fits.” I haven’t heard Mannequin Pussy yet, #9 on Rob Sheffield’s album list--I feel bad about that. (In 1995, I was somewhat taken aback by the forthrightness of Adina Howard’s great “Freak Like Me,” which had barking dogs as a barely euphemistic stand-in for sex; we’ve moved on.) No one talks pussy like Nicki Minaj, though--her PPM is off the chart. Rule #2 is my favourite of her three rules; #1 and #3 are just okay. I’m not qualified for such detective work, but this seems to be influenced by that weird Zebra Katz record from a couple of years ago, especially the half-spoken interlude. Probably the filthiest record I’ve ever voted for, at least until next year. “Ask Lil Wayne what a five-star bitch is”--love that line. I have other questions for Lil Wayne.

Nobody Even There to Bluff (2014)

It seems redundant at this point--I’ve already posted on Facebook and ILX--but I should make note here of the book I just self-published, Interrupting My Train of Thought. It collects stuff from here, various ‘90s fanzines, Nerve, year-end ballots, Facebook countdowns, rockcritics.com, the Voice, Cinemascope, and elsewhere. Originally I was aiming to keep it around 350 pages, but because of a formatting error (I initially had the margins set incorrectly) and publishing costs that ended up being much less than I expected, it runs around 450 pages. I’m glad--it’s a one-time thing, so may as well get as much in there as possible. Scott Woods and Tim Powis (editing), Karen Watts (cover art), Vaughn Dragland (layout), and Rob Sheffield (foreword) all helped make the book exactly what I’d hoped it would be.

You can buy it from Amazon (here's the Canadian link, but the book is also available from other countries).

Two other links:

A fantastic website set up by Scott;

A Spotify playlist that Jer Fairall has been nice enough to set up (replacing the dead Grooveshark playlist), with over 150 songs from the book and growing. I've spent the last year making fun of Spotify playlists ("Is there a playlist? Is there a playlist?"), but now I have my own, so everything's okay.

(Interrupting My Train of Thought deathwatch: 54 copies sold.)