Sleeping In (2017)

A few days ago on Facebook, a friend linked to an article meant to calm Blue Jays fans panicked over the team’s 1-6 start. Not to worry, the piece argued, “Slow starts are nothing new to the Blue Jays”; only one winning April since 2010, and sub-.500 Aprils in both of the past two playoff- bound seasons. The Jays have since lost their next three games, leaving them at 1-9 for the first time in franchise history. The same friend put up another link this morning meant to tell everyone it’s time to give up: “1-9 Teams Don't Make the Playoffs” says the Bluebird Banter site, based on evidence gathered over the past 30 seasons.

I didn’t see the Bluebird Banter piece until just now, after spending the past day looking into the exact same question: how significant is a 1-9 start to the season? It’s an idea I became interested in some 30 years ago, when Bill James had a long piece in the 1985 Abstract (just the second Abstract I’d bought at the time) about the Tigers’ phenomenal start to the ’84 season, when they won 35 of their first 40 games (and nine of their first ten). James was looking at the same question turned upside down: how significant is a 9-1 start to the season?

Looking at the game-by-game logs of all teams between 1965 and 1984--minus the two strike seasons; not sure why--James came to the general conclusion that significance starts to establish itself as soon as 10 or 11 games, but only at the extremes: “A .450 team doesn’t go 11-2; at that moment, you have credible evidence that the team is improved. Going .450 is inconsistent with the performance expectations of a .450 team.” James included various expected-frequency tables to back up the claim, but I’m too lazy to wade through them at the moment.

The piece stayed with me. Even at 1-6, I was starting to think the Jays were close to entering that zone of significance; three games later, I think they’re there. To test this, I did what James did (and what the Bluebird Banter site has done), started looking for all teams that had started a season either 1-9 or 0-10. At first I was only going to go as far back as the beginning of divisional play in 1969; I had it in my mind that the dynamic of a season was fundamentally different before divisional play, and that anything earlier didn’t mean the same thing. I also had this notion that the first half of the century was filled with all these perennial doormats--the Braves, the Senators, the Phillies--and that they’d be showing up on the list constantly, without the draft and free-agent mechanisms in place today that are supposed to help such teams climb out of perpetual misery. I was wrong: awful starts were no more frequent in the first half of the twentieth century than they are today--they may in fact have been less frequent, although you’d have to adjust for the number of teams to be sure. Anyway, I kept going back, all the way to when the American League joined the National in 1901.

Before getting to the list, let me say that it must have been fun to do this kind of research in 1984. Even with Baseball Reference’s Play Index, I still had to click through season by season and look at the standings on a given date (which I then had to continually adjust, as there was a considerable amount of variance in season start-dates through the years) to assemble what follows. No idea what hellish route James had to take. He did have one smart shortcut in generating his data: “I compiled (or actually, I hired Chuck Waseleski to compile for me)...”

Starting a season 0-10 or 1-9 is not easy to do; I found only 42 teams besides this year’s Jays that have done so since 1901. Here are their seasons broken down by their first ten games, their records the rest of the way, and their overall W-L records for each season. (I don't know how to format a table with HTML, so I had to convert a Word document to a .jpg image.)

That’s where the Jays are right now: in the company of the ’62 Mets, the ’03 Tigers, the ’88 Orioles (who started the year 0-21), and the ’04 Senators, four of the most famously awful teams ever. (The ’52 Pirates just missed the list thanks to a jack-rabbit 2-8 start.) A few other teams of some notoriety: the '98 fire-sale Marlins (defending World Champions, scattered to the four winds), the '87 Indians (who were picked by Sports Illustrated to win the World Series, and then went on to post the worst record in baseball--what's known as the M.P.E., or Maximum Possible Error), and the '68 White Sox, who even as measured against the Year of the Pitcher had to have had one of the most abysmal offenses ever (not a single player slugged over .400, including all the part-time players with fewer than 100 AB; as a team they hit 71 HR, scored 463 runs, and had a slash line of .228/.284/.311).

So where does all this lead?

1.  How many of these teams went on to make the playoffs? Zero. As the Bluebird Banter piece says, it simply doesn’t happen, even if you extend their chart all the way back to 1901. I'll note here that probably the most famous comeback team of all, the ’51 Giants--Bobby Thomson, Russ Hodges, etc.--also just missed the list at 2-8, which soon went to 2-12. The Giants went 96-47 from that point forward, a .671 clip, which got them into a one-game-playoff. All the Jays would need to grab a wild-card spot would be .570-.580 the rest of the way; if you think they can do that, rest easy. I'm seeing the 2011 Red Sox mentioned as a (sort of) encouraging precedent, starting off 2-10, climbing to 31 games over .500 and a 1.5-game lead in the AL East on August 31--the team had gone 81-42 in the interim, almost a .667 clip--and then commencing one of the great collapses in recent history over the next month-plus. Also absent from the list is my 1974 Mac's Milk pee-wee team, which finished last in the regular season but went on to take the championship behind a pitcher who learned how to throw a knuckle-curve and was able to use that to intimidate terrified 12-year-olds.

2.  How many of these teams ended up with a winning record? Five: the 1983 Astros, the '80 Braves, the '22 Reds, the '21 Cardinals, and the '16 Giants. Collectively, they went 420-312 (.574) the rest of the way--squarely in that wild-card range for the Jays.

3.  How many of these teams ended up exactly at .500? One, the ’73 Cardinals. That was the famous NL East race won by the “You Gotta Believe” Mets, where five of the six teams were within 4.0 games of the lead going into the final week.

4.  Did any teams play .500 or better for the rest of the year but still finish under .500 for the season? Two: the '59 Tigers and the '44 Cubs, bringing the total of teams that were able to post a winning record for the rest of the year to eight out of 42, or about one in five. But 13 went on to lose another 100+ games, almost one in three.

5.  How many of these teams got even worse after their first 10 games? Again, zero. The Jays are going to get better--they won’t end up 16-146.

6.  What can you expect of the Jays? The very best case scenario would be the '21 Cardinals, who went 86-57 after a 1-9 start. They had Rogers Hornsby having one of his three or four greatest seasons; we’ve got an ailing Josh Donaldson.

The very worst case scenario is, no surprise, the ’62 Mets: 1-9 start, 39-111 the rest of the way. They had Marv Throneberry; we’ve got Justin Smoak. Call that a wash, but we’re going to win more than 40 games--many more.

If the Jays play at the mean rate of these teams, .433 for the remainder of the season, they end up 66-96. They should be better than that, though, especially if you account for some bad luck as measured by run differential through these first 10 games (seven of their nine losses have been by only one or two runs; in the consolation Pythagorean League, they should be 3-7). I'm going to say they go 73-89 and bring the Alex Anthopoulos/bat-flip/Superman mini-era to a sobering end. Casey Stengel was still there at the end of the Mets’ 1962 season. John Gibbons of the 2017 Blue Jays won’t be.

You Can Lose Your Way (2017)

Without checking back, I probably start every one of these movie year-ends the same way: I saw the same 30 or 40 new films I always do.

Forty-one, to be exact, although it’s tricky deciding which late-2015 releases I didn’t catch up with until January feel more like last year and which to count as this year. If it’s a bigger film that comes out with a lot of fanfare and which ends up getting nominated for awards--e.g., The Martian--I tend to relegate those to the previous year. If it’s something smaller that is dated 2015 but probably didn’t show up in Toronto until early in the new year--e.g., James White and I Smile Back--those I’ll count as new.

According to ILX’s “Last (x) movies you saw” thread, I listed and rated 141 films this year, which means I saw over 150--at a certain point, because it was getting embarrassing, I stopped including some of the older films I seem to re-watch on a rotating basis every two or three months. That 41 of them were new actually surprises me, as three things got in the way this year:

1) I have three somewhat pricey memberships with local theatres--the Revue has now gone the way of the Lightbox and the Bloor--and it felt like I just wasn’t using them very often. Don’t like driving downtown, parking gets worse and worse, and I didn’t much like the Lightbox’s schedule this year.

2) Spent a lot of August and September watching older Trump-related films for a book.

3) Once I finished with that, I kind of shut down for a month--job-related stress--and hardly left the house.

With all of that, I still managed to semi-keep up with what I wanted to see. First, a Top 10, then I’ll break down the rest of the 41 by ratings:

1. O.J. Simpson: Made in America (8.5)

2. De Palma (7.5)

3. Maggie’s Plan (7.5)

4. Obit (7.5)

5. Manchester by the Sea (7.5)

6. Sing Street (7.5)

7. Moonlight (7.5)

8. Christine (7.0)

9. Arrival (7.0)

10. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words (7.0)

The O.J. documentary was the only new film I gave an 8.0-or-higher to on ILX. I saw it at the documentary festival in one sitting, so I don’t know if it would feel quite as epic chopped up on TV, which seemed to be how most people experienced it. Complaining that it’s not a “real film” seems silly to me. How would it have been made any differently if it had been done expressly for theatre release? All I can think of is that it would have been substantially shorter. Also, how is it any different than something like Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (or other such parallel examples), which was also originally made for TV?

The next nine films were the 7.0s and 7.5s, along with the following: Don't Blink – Robert Frank (7.5), Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (7.0), Mustang (7.0), Janis: Little Girl Blue (7.0), Hockney (7.0), The Pulitzer at 100 (7.0), Wiener Dog (7.0), Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (7.0), Under the Sun (7.0). As always, I’m too forgiving with documentaries. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about The Pulitzer at 100, but the subject and interviewees held my interest the whole way through.

6.0s and 6.5s would seem to be interchangeable, but 6.5s usually have a performance or something else that stays in my mind, and 6.0s are often things I was looking forward to and were disappointing. Not always--sometimes they just mean that I saw this movie, didn’t dislike it, and quickly forgot about it: James White (6.0), The Hateful Eight (6.0), I Smile Back (6.0), Joy (6.5), Crazy About Tiffany’s (6.0), The Big Short (6.5), Cemetery of Splendor (6.5), The Incomparable Rose Hartman (6.5), The Damned: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead (6.0), Midnight Special (6.5), American Dreamer* (6.5), Weiner (6.0), Money Monster (6.0), Eight Days a Week (6.5), The Girl on the Train (6.0), The Accountant (6.0), Everybody Wants Some! (6.0)

Three films I could’ve and should’ve liked and didn’t: Hail, Caesar! (5.5), The Nice Guys (5.5), Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (5.5). The thoroughly pedestrian Everybody Wants Some! was approximately two minutes--the great “Rapper's Delight” scene--away from being dumped into this group.

Film I was wary about assigning a rating to: No Home Movie (--). I’ve liked Chantal Akerman films, and this one (released just before or after her death) was obviously as personal as could be. I found it tedious.

The one film I most regret missing was Tower, about Charles Whitman. It played at the Kingsway for a few weeks, but mostly daytime screenings during the week, and knowing it was a mix of news footage (good) and animated recreations (not good), I kept delaying until finally it was too late. David Edelstein had it on his Top 10, and I’m not sure if it’ll show up again anytime soon.

*The Kit Carson/Lawrence Schiller documentary from '71 about Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. Got its first official release this year, and improbably turned up at the Carlton for a week. I think there were four other people in the theatre besides me.

The Best Bits (2017)

2016 YEAR-END BALLOT

1. “Dropping Houses,” Wussy: Forever Sounds is the first LP of theirs where I don’t like at least half of it. Really, not much of anything catches my ear after “Dropping Houses,” although “She’s Killed Hundreds” does have a memorable lyric hooked around the title.

I didn’t think I’d like “Dropping Houses” either the first time I played it. Clearly it belonged to their “heavy” side, quotation marks pejoratively intended; Chuck Cleaver puts one or two songs on every album like that, and they’re always dead weight. But then it gets going, and it’s not that--it’s one of their dreamy, chaotic, end-of-the-world songs, “Little Miami” and “Pizza King” and “Home,” and whenever they’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too, they’re as good as anyone ever.

I had a file folder of Obama songs in 2008, most of them passed along by a friend. Conceding that I never pay close attention to new music until late in the year, there didn’t seem to be much out there that directly addressed the nine-ton elephant in the room. The two songs I heard that tried to--a Tribe Called Quest’s “We the People” and the fuck-Donald-Trump one--both seemed clunky and forced to me. Strange, because moving beyond music there are people out there who are hell-bent on connecting Trump to everything. So let me add to that lunacy and say that “Dropping Houses” makes for a much better, much more evocative Trump song than either one of those two. (I have no idea what it’s actually about.) I’d even suggest that Wussy have been waiting for Trump since “Airborne,” their first song on their first album 11 years ago.

2. “All Night,” Chance the Rapper: Very much in the tradition of Tony! Toni! Toné! Loc’s “Let’s Get Down” and Vic Mensa’s “Down on My Luck,” my two favorite drinking songs ever (which amount to memory songs for me--i.e., I don’t anymore). They’re about world-class drinkers, this one’s about a guy who should never drink, but the mood’s just the same in the end. What it needs is a video as great as those two to go along with it.

3. “Emotional High,” Mannequin Pussy: The last sound I’ll hear before I die--female voice struggling to be heard above the (melodic--has to be melodic) din, losing at first, getting there eventually, Grace Slick, Courtney Love, etc.

4. “Am I Wrong,” Anderson .Paak: Not sure if the first two words are “My life,” “Why lie?” or “White light.” I could check that in three seconds, but--my most frequently quoted movie line of the past few years--let’s just not know. Very suave, gives me an excuse not to vote for that Bruno Mars song that sounds pretty good, which would feel to me like voting for Sha Na Na, and I’d rather not do that.

5. “Old Friends,” Pinegrove: I thought a Google search of “pinegrove neil young” would return a few thousand results, but I get almost nothing. I guess it’s such an obvious comparison--musically more than vocally--you’ve got to be as lazy as I am to go ahead and make it.

6. “Black Beatles,” Rae Sremmurd: I called over a former student of mine a few weeks ago--I taught her in grade 6; she’s in 8 now--and said “Tell me about ‘Black Beatles.’” Basically I just wanted to say, “See how they mention John Lennon and Paul McCartney? Aren’t you glad I used to talk about that stuff all the time?” I could go on for several pages about my weaknesses and blind spots as a teacher, but, two years away from retirement, the one thing I know I did really well was get kids interested in what interests me. The Beatles were fairly easy; I could also do it with Richard Nixon’s farewell address to his staff, or the coffee cup from Two or Three Things I Know About Her. (Which is not to say everyone was interested...narrow but deep, let’s say, and this particular girl was someone I got through to.) I remember a few years ago, at a grade-level meeting, I suggested we do a reading about Gordon Lightfoot and another teacher said no, it should be something directly related to the kids’ lives, cell phones and video games and such. That’s a viewpoint I always fundamentally disagreed with; the much more rewarding approach is to take something the kids don’t think they’re interested in and make them understand why they are. It’s like Kyle Chandler on Friday Night Lights the couple of times students told him they didn’t like football: “Yes you do--you just don’t know it yet.”

7. “30 Keys,” Ka; 8. “Lockjaw,” French Montana; and 9. “Wicked,” Future:  The only one of these that’s explicitly about drugs sounds less druggy than the two that are the kind of slurred, zonked-out hip-hop that invariably sounds druggy by default. I always vote for this stuff. Part of my job is warning kids about substance abuse, but in some past life I’m convinced I must have been a drug dealer.

10. “Work from Home,” Fifth Harmony/“Work,” Rihanna: Obvious pairing for the final spot, even though I only had room enough on the Voice’s form ballot to vote for Fifth Harmony. Not sure if Rihanna has the most-ever hits for a female singer now. If it’s her, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, and Britney Spears clustered at the top, I’ll take Rihanna and Madonna and pass on the other three.

 

Update: I listen to so little new music these days, and it takes me so long to catch up with a year, that I'll limit myself to one postscript. Heard two songs this week I would have included in the above list: a Tribe Called Quest's "Black Spasmodic" and the Pet Shop Boys' "The Pop Kids." Found the Tribe Called Quest CD cheap on Boxing Day, and though I don't like very much of it, "Black Spasmodic" captures what I love about "Bonita Applebum" much more than "We the People." "The Pop Kids" is such a perfect distillation of the Pet Shop Boys, it's almost as if they set out to parody themselves: "We were young but imagined we were so sophisticated/Telling everyone we knew that rock was overrated." Either way, a perfect distillation of the Pet Shop Boys is going to sound great by default.

I found a list--video clip, actually--of the female artists with the most Top 40 hits. (That's the metric I'd use; #1 hits gives too much of an advantage to current artists, Top 100 hits probably gives too much of an advantage to '50s and '60s singers like Brenda Lee.) The top 11, as of last summer: 1. Madonna and Taylor Swift (50), 3. Rihanna (47), 4. Aretha Franklin (43), 5. Diana Ross (38), 6. Janet Jackson (36), 7. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Nicki Minaj, and Connie Francis (35), 11. Beyoncé (34). (Britney Spears has 26, a few spots lower.) Not sure if that includes the Supremes and Destiny's Child or not.

So the top 3 are Madonna, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna. Even more emphatically than above: I'll take Rihanna and Madonna and launch Taylor Swift airborne, never to return.

You Won't Be Sorry (2016)

If I ever had to knock out a book on Neil Young in a month--which I absolutely couldn’t do, but put that aside--I know how the book would end: I’d be lying in a burned-out basement, with the full moon in my eyes, trying to figure out whether, no matter how profoundly a few albums of his entered my life four decades ago, I’d actually be a happier person today if I’d never heard of Neil Young. I think I might be. Rob Sheffield’s On Bowie, which he wrote in a month and is about how profoundly a few albums of his entered Rob’s life almost three decades ago (technically it’s about Bowie’s life and death and music, too, plus Casey Kasem, of course), ends with Rob and his wife at a “Bowie jam session sing-along dance party” in a bar at the edge of the Mojave Desert, where Rob dances and screams and falls in love with everyone in the room. I don’t think there’s a single image that would better sum up Rob’s books (the last three, anyway) better than a Bowie jam session sing-along dance party in a bar at the edge of the Mojave Desert. I mean that in the best way possible.

I’ve detailed my own schizophrenic relationship to David Bowie here and elsewhere. The very short version: from a Changesone fan in high school (lasted about...five years), to scorn and ridicule (the next 20), to this really weird place where I’d qualify my antipathy with a footnote about these four or five or eight songs I thought were the greatest thing ever (the last decade). But still very much a non-convert, and genuinely puzzled by the outpouring of...feeling when he died earlier this year. So my guess is that, whereas most people familiar with Love Is a Mix Tape and Talking to Girls About Duran and Turn Around Bright Eyes will pick up On Bowie thinking “I’d read Rob on anything, especially David Bowie,” with me it’s more like “I’d read Rob on anything, even David Bowie.” I mean that in the best way possible.

I finished On Bowie in a day, which a voracious reader even wouldn’t bother mentioning, but for me that’s something. (Three books I remember devouring at the same speed: the first Bill James Historical Abstract, Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revoultion, and Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On.) It’s a self-proclaimed “love letter to Bowie,” and it is, but it’s not uncritical: the second half of the ‘80s gets a somewhat sympathetic but unambiguously pointed dismissal (“He was excited about his Web site” is a perfectly dry summation), and there’s a chapter on a couple of mid-‘70s controversies, one real and one manufactured (I have only vague memories of the real one), that’s very fair and far from apologetic. I don’t want to make the book sound more high-minded and less guileless and awestruck than it is...and I mean that in the best way possible. The structure is both chronological and playfully fragmentary--maybe a tribute to Rob’s favourite Bowie (or any other) album, Low--and it’s a great book to read with YouTube close at hand, where you can find all the old clips Rob lovingly details. (Soul Train, 1975: “First there’s an agonizing Q&A with the audience; Bowie mutters at the floor until a worried-looking Don Cornelius says, ‘Okay, David, I think we have to move on’”--I can verify that this is all true, punctuated by Bowie laughing painfully awkwardly at four or five of his own jokes that no one else gets.) On Bowie is also, as it needs to be, a book that completely understands the ‘70s. Another clip, also from 1975, Bowie and Cher rambling through an oldies medley on Cher’s variety show: “They’re trying to sum up rock and roll history, tramping and thieving through the fifties and sixties, yet there’s nothing not seventies about it...” I can verify that this is all true--only in 1975 would two of the world’s three most garish pop stars decide that Three Dog Night and “Song Sung Blue” belonged in an oldies medley alongside the Crystals.

So: does On Bowie make me go all bipperty-bopperty and come out the other side as a true believer? That’s a bridge I just can’t cross, but the book certainly makes me wish I could. Rob says that Bowie’s five-LP sequence that begins with Station to Station in 1976 and ends with Scary Monsters in 1980 is “the best five-album run of anyone in the seventies (or since).” No surprise: conceding I only own the first two of those five, and only know a handful of songs from the others, and also that I’m not an album guy by disposition, I’d easily give the nod there to Neil Young from After the Gold Rush to Zuma, which--ignoring Journey Through the Past--encompasses six albums, and can be stretched to seven if you include 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. (Except for “Heroes,” all my favourite Bowie songs date between ’71 and ’74, plus a couple of mid-‘60s singles by the Lower Third.) Not to mention the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and Husker Du, and countless other people who’ve had five-album sequences that mean more to me. The heroic ability to connect with lost high school misfits that Rob finds in Bowie, again, for me that was Neil. And there’s a 1972 appearance on Top of the Pops, where Bowie performs “Starman” with Mick Ronson at his side and the usual conglomerate of gently swaying British teenagers in the background, that Rob convincingly identifies as the Sun Sessions of Brit-Pop for two or three generations to follow. From the quotes that Rob assembles, and the way he's able to conjure up the moment so beautifully (“the bassist with the bleached muttonchops, the befuddled-looking dancing boy in the sweater vest, the Asian fangirl in the pink prom dress...”), it’s obviously an epochal, career-making performance. For me, it’s a pleasant version of a song I’m mostly indifferent to--I did like how it was used in The Martian. Two clips of the same vintage that move me in the same ways that “Starman” moves Rob: Rod Stewart (reading off a lyric sheet) doing “You Wear it Well” on TOTP in 1972 and, also TOTP, Slade romping through “Merry X'mas Everybody” a couple of years later. If I could live inside any video clip ever, those would be my first two picks.

They’re all of a piece--Rob’s love for the “Starman” clip brings me back to Slade and Rod Stewart, and that’s worth quite a lot. I’ll finish with my favourite throwaway line in the whole book, from a moment where Rob and one of his grade-eight friends are listening to M’s “Pop Muzik” and searching hard for clues, convinced that it’s Bowie who’s behind this mysterious and seemingly anonymous record: “nobody knew a thing about this M, or as Casey Kasem called him, ‘the man who bills himself as the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.’” To remember something like that, and to understand why, 37 years later, it absolutely has to be quoted--and even if Rob dreamed the whole thing up, it’s still the most Casey Kasem-like remark I’ve ever come across, to a degree that I can hear it in his voice like he’s saying it right now--that’s why I raced through On Bowie in a day.

Even Better with a Partner (2016)

When I thanked Jeff Pike in the acknowledgements to a book I self-published last year, I said “He should be doing this instead of me.” (“They,” actually--I included Steven Rubio in that.) People who put out collections of their writing are, or at least should be, people who write all the time. I don’t; Jeff does, at least once or twice a week on the site he’s been maintaining for the past decade, Can’t Explain. He actually writes, seemingly just for the fun of it.

Another thing Jeff does that I don’t--not anymore--is he continues to write candidly about his life. I stopped doing that. I did a lot of it 20 years ago, used everything up, then my life got boring. The past decade, I’ve turned into George Costanza’s description of Jerry’s stand-up act: “What, you do a lot of that ‘Did you ever notice’ stuff, right?” This was really brought home to me as I read through Jeff’s examinations of his divorce, drug-taking, life without children, and other very personal matters in Index: Essays, Fragments, and Liberal Arts Homework, a self-published collection of his writing covering over 20 years. And Strat-O-Matic baseball; it takes a lot of courage to share your tabletop-baseball obsession with the rest of the world.

My familiarity with Jeff’s writing goes back to when he put out my second-favourite fanzine ever, Tapeworm, kind of an early blueprint for the song-at-a-time way that people experience music nowadays. You’d make a mix-tape for Jeff, then send along some comments on the songs you picked along with the tape. The earliest pieces in Index, beginning with a lengthy argument with Joe Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic--I guess Jeff thought it would be silly to mail himself a mix-tape, so he’d write about other stuff--date back to the Tapeworm days. Loved Tapeworm; still have all my copies, and used some of my own contributions when assembling Interrupting My Train of Thought.

I’d say about half of Index concerns itself with music, and the other half is split between movies and books. In terms of music and movies, Jeff and I more or less come from the same place: Husker Du and the Beatles (great piece on Rubber Soul), the Pet Shop Boys and Carole King (ditto Tapestry, “the first album cover I ever spent lots of time staring at”), Scorsese and Coppola and Highway 61. (As per the book’s title, Index is organized alphabetically rather than chronologically or thematically, with ruminations on all 26 letters--“Z” is the only section without an actual entry; wish Jeff’s thoughts on Zodiac were in here...) With books, I again skulk off into the corner and defer to Jeff. He writes about made-up stories...chapter books...“novels” they’re called. I remember them from university: Faulkner, Austen, Henry James, that whole crew. A couple of years ago, when I made a personal pledge to start reading them again, I excitedly e-mailed Jeff in search of approval, encouragement, something. I got 100 pages into Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, put it aside (it was fine, but the concentration just wasn’t there), and I’m now back to my usual mix of biographies, politics, and whatever non-fiction manages to grab my attention. What am I trying to say? I genuinely admire that Jeff continues to engage with and write thoughtfully about (and, clearly, enjoy) something I left behind long ago and am too lazy to revisit. Index bounces back and forth from one to the other to the third, and it’s always Jeff’s voice wherever he lands.

I don’t envy Jeff the next few months: trying to stir up interest in a self-published book isn’t easy, even less so if you sit around waiting for the world to magically stir itself into being interested. I wish him luck, and really hope Index finds its way to as many readers as possible.

167 Languages Spoken Here (2016)

I saw the same 30 new films in 2015 as I do every year--31, to be precise--but, if you were to add in the older films I saw in theatres, I’m pretty sure my movie-going is on the decline. Three reasons I can think of, in no particular order:

1) I caught up with the rest of the world and watched a lot more television (meaning some of those big-deal shows that people talk about and that the internet obsesses over). It started with Mad Men over the 2014-15 holiday break (again, I’m catching up), followed by Friday Night Lights, House of Cards, Mr. Robot, True Detective, and The Leftovers. The first two I loved (and wrote about), the other four captured my interest enough, and often much more than enough, to keep me home.

2) The person I used to go to a lot of movies with, that kind of ended the summer before last. It definitely ended; the “kind of” is because I was never quite sure what “it” was. But we did see a lot of movies, and now I see fewer.

3) Ever-dwindling energy level. Of the films I went out to see on my own, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a single time where I didn’t have to force myself either a little or a lot. With even the first-run films I most want to see, I tend to delay and delay--is it going to be playing next week? if I miss it at one theatre, will it show up somewhere else?--and end up either catching the last possible screening or, as with The Stanford Prison Experiment, miss it altogether and rent it out at Queen Video months later.

As I mentioned on Facebook, the only thing that really got to me at the movies this year was a Charlie Rose interview with William Buckley that turned up in Best of Enemies (a really good film that was made great for me by what amounted to an epilogue about Buckley and Vidal after people stopped caring about what they had to say). “Because I’m tired of life...” It’s like that Jackson C. Frank song: the thought of ending up in that place is terrifying (and occasionally wondering if you're already there even more so).

I might be forgetting something (I only remembered True Story today), but here’s a Top 10 for the year, followed by everything else. Fifteen of the 31 films were narrative, 16 documentaries, an almost even split. As Cybill Shepherd once said by way of Kris Kristofferson, partly truth and partly fiction--a walking contradiction.

1. Best of Enemies

2. In Jackson Heights

3. Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

4. Diary of a Teenage Girl

5. Mistress America

6. The Martian

7. Eden

8. Hitchcock/Truffaut

9. Straight Outta Compton

10.(tie) She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry

   The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Rest of the Documentaries: Deep Web, The Wolfpack, Dior & I, Listen to Me Marlon, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Tab Hunter Confidential, Very Semi-Serious, Requiem for the American Dream, All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, A Lego Brickumentary. (Didn’t care for The Wolfpack or the Lego film, the rest I more or less liked.)

Rest of the Not-Documentaries: Spotlight, Tangerine, Room, True Story, While We’re Young, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Love & Mercy, The End of the Tour, Blackhat, Maps to the Stars. (The two I flat-out didn’t like were Blackhat and--one of the most acclaimed films of the year--Tangerine. A couple of others were iffy but had something I liked--a song, a performance--the rest were pretty good. I do think Spotlight is overrated.)

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.