By Gad, Sir--You Are a Character (2020)

It’s only a small part of Curt Schilling’s HOF résumé, but if you’re a Jays fan, you remember: in Game 5 of the 1993 World Series, the game before the game that even non-Jays fans could tell you about, Schilling pushed the Series to a Game 6 by throwing a 147-pitch shutout. He gave up five hits, walked three, and struck out six. I’m not sure if anyone’s thrown as many pitches in a WS shutout since then--truthfully, I’m not even sure if anyone’s thrown a WS shutout period since then. (Bumgarner?) Was Mitch Williams out in the bullpen warming up the last couple of innings? Is Juan Guzman (who pitched really well too) still fidgeting around on a mound somewhere as I write?

This year, and maybe (probably) next year too, Schilling is the most interesting HOF debate. The Scott Rolen (somewhat of an itinerant, fragmented career) and Todd Helton (Coors Field) debates seem to have resolved themselves--both have picked up a lot of support, and both are going in (next year for Rolen, soon after for Helton). The Schilling debate, as with the procession of PED players from the past few years, has nothing to do with performance; I doubt there are many writers who wouldn’t vote him in on the merits if he were Orel Hershiser or Fernando Valenzuela or any other pitcher who was generally considered to be a Nice Guy and Good Person. But Schilling, these days, has probably surpassed Bonds and Clemens and A-Rod as baseball’s #1 villain, and as such, has both shifted and intensified the “character counts” argument that attached itself to PED users the past decade or so.

Two prominent voters wrote at length about why they were dropping Schilling from their ballot this time around, after having voted for him--and publically advocated for him--for years: Joe Posnanski and Jay Jaffe. (Actually, Jaffe was limited to advocating; he’s a first-time voter this year, even though he’s probably written about the HOF more than anybody the past decade.)

Posnasnki

Jaffe

Posnanski’s may be behind a paywall--it’s part of his “Outsiders” countdown, the 100 best players eligible for but not yet in the Hall. He’s got Schilling at #30, quite a drop from where he would have put him a few years ago. The accompanying write-up is a declaration, and quite compelling:

“...it isn’t Schilling’s politics. It’s his nastiness. It’s his intolerance. It’s his compulsion to troll. Curt Schilling pushes anger and fear and hatred. Every day he divides, every day he offends...and all the while, he makes sure to note that those he offends deserve it, and bleep ’em if they can’t take a joke, and if they happen to have a Hall of Fame vote they should give it to him anyway because he was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I’ve done that for eight years. He was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I still rank him as one of the 100 greatest players in baseball history. But I’m not voting for him. I suspect he will get into the Hall of Fame anyway, and that’s fine. He doesn’t need my vote. He shows every day he doesn’t want my vote.”

And to underscore his point, Posnanski has included in his countdown--and elevated their rankings to a position not quite supported by their on-field accomplishments--a few players and managers for the totality of their baseball lives: Curt Flood, Dale Murphy, Gil Hodges, Dusty Baker, and Felipe Alou, and he’s about to list Buck O’Neil in his top three, possibly even #1.

I’m all for this. Curt Flood should absolutely be in the HOF, and now that Posnanski has me thinking about Alou and Baker, I’d say yes to them too. Much less enthusiastic about Murphy, but the point is, giving guys credit for things that aren’t reflected in their Baseball Reference career boxes, I think that’s a good and probably overdue idea. (I’ve even jokingly hinted that players should get HOF credit for memorable nicknames--Al Hrabosky, your time may come yet.) Which brings everything back to Schilling. Credit, yes; does the obvious corollary--that they ought to be penalized when the totality is much less than what happened on the field--apply too?

I’m less sure than ever how I feel about these things. Towards the end of Bonds’ career, I was 100% a defender; as time passed, and the utter freakishness of those last few seasons nagged at me, I stopped caring. But I’ve also accepted that the ten or so players who’ve been kept out of the Hall because of PEDs are barely the tip of the iceberg, and that there are users already in there. I used to be bothered by itinerant careers like Rolen’s, or Tim Raines’; I still am, but I’m not sure that I should be. I never liked the Andruw Jones or Joe Mauer type career where a player’s value pretty much vanished after he turned 30 or 31, no matter how much they’d done before that; I still don’t, but I’m not sure anymore whether that should make a difference. (Are Albert Pujols’ HOF credentials any better today than they would have been had he retired in 2011 rather than limp along for another decade--recently as one of the worst everyday players in baseball?)

Schilling’s even trickier for me. PEDs are presumably exactly as advertised: performance enhancing drugs. Bill James (who, though I doubt he’d ever admit it, has himself been all over the place on this issue) wrote last week that PEDs don’t matter because sabermetrics always measures performance relatively, against the rest of the league, so a league- and park-adjusted stat like OPS+ puts everything in context. I don’t know--doesn’t that start from the assumption that 100% of the league was using PEDs? My sense is that the most liberal guesstimates generally put that number somewhere around 50%. If you used, you benefitted; if you declined to, you didn’t.

But PES--performance enhancing stupidity--doesn’t exist. (PER--performance enhancing racism--does, if you go back to Ty Cobb and anyone else pre-integration, in that every white player faced inferior competition without any African Americans in the league. Relative to each other, though, they all benefitted equally.) Whatever Schilling has said since he retired--and he’s said some horrendous things, right up to and including the recent attack on congress--he didn’t benefit from this materially as a player. Even if he’d said these things while still active, ditto. For me, PEDs were never a character issue, something I would try to explain whenever someone tried to wave them away as such.

I would probably still hold my breath and vote for him. I think--I don’t know anymore. As I’m sure Posnanski and Jaffe point out, HOF induction is about more than just the honour and the plaque; getting into Cooperstown is a financial windfall in terms of what a player can charge for autographs at card shows. So even if (how I envision it) you induct him and then have him experience the indignity of a ceremony where everybody sits on their hands during his speech--the attending players, at least, if not all the fans; you Kazan him, in other words--once that moment passes, he’s out there charging $100 per signature for the rest of his life. And, you can bet, saying lots more stupid stuff.

Character counts...I like Posnanski’s efforts in trying to get this idea to take hold, but I wonder if that’s going to be even murkier than PEDs. With Schilling--or, at the other end of the spectrum, Buck O’Neil--it seems clear-cut enough. But sometimes, like with Kirby Puckett (or, this year, Omar Vizquel), you’re the greatest person in the world on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday you’re not. Dick Allen was a pariah for years; as time passes, a much more nuanced and favorable view of Allen has emerged.

I don’t have a vote, so I don’t have to decide. (Something else I always say to anyone exasperated by my fence-sitting: if you don’t have a vote, agnosticism is perfectly okay.) For those who do, it doesn't always seem to bring the same sense of excitement and privilege I’m sure it did two or three decades ago. Ken Rosenthal, writing about his ballot this year: “Right now, I’m reconsidering everything, including whether I still want to vote for the Hall of Fame.”

The results of this year's voting are released tomorrow night (Tuesday, Jan. 26). Schilling is right on the fence at the moment: 172 voters have released their ballots ahead of the announcement, roughly 45% of the electorate, and Schilling sits at 75.3%, just barely ahead of the 75% needed for induction. The way it usually works with sabermetrically strong candidates like Schilling is that they get their strongest support from voters who declare publically, then fall back when the rest of the votes are counted. With Schilling, I was thinking that it might work the other way, that some people who voted for him might want to keep that to themselves. But more important than any of that, he's thus far lost one net vote from last year, when he ended up with 70% support, so there's a good chance he'll miss again. (In a very strange development, some people who voted for him this year have requested that Schilling's name be removed from their ballots after he publically supported the insurrection three weeks ago.) If he does, he'll have one last chance next year, his 10th appearance on the ballot. With Ortiz coming on (A-Rod, also, who'll be starting an extended Bonds/Clemens purgatory that will take votes away from others), and Rolen and Helton getting stronger--maybe Andruw Jones and Billy Wagner, too--I don't see any last-minute momentum. If that's what happens, and he's dropped from the ballot, he can then set up shop somewhere for the rest of his life and complain about a rigged election, just like his mentor.

They Like to Help, You Know, Sometimes (2020)

Year-end list-making and me are just barely hanging on.

I didn’t put together a year-end music list for 2019. There was no Pazz & Jop last year, and that was the sole incentive (and, before Pazz & Jop, the yearly Eye poll out of Toronto; for a few years I submitted lists to both) that had me sit down every December, wade through all the other year-end lists that had already been published, and compress a year’s worth of listening into a couple of weeks...well, for at least the past decade--there was a time when I actually did keep up reasonably well on my own. I wrote lots and lots of comments, three or four pages of them every year--cumulatively, probably more than anyone in the history of Pazz & Jop except Christgau himself; I really do believe that--and waited to see if any of them were included in the published poll. In the interim, I'd post all the lists and the comments here. I could still do that, of course, but absent Pazz & Jop, the desire just isn’t there anymore. Scott Woods and I did draw up decade-end lists a year ago, and compared notes in a 23-part Skype conversation, but opportunities for decade-end  lists only present themselves every 10 years by my calculation.

And that’s also what I did in place of a year-end film list for 2019, put together a list for the 2010s instead, but with the full intention of returning to a yearly Top 10 in 2020. I’d stopped keeping up with new music, but new films were just part of living. Until March 11, 2020, anyway, at which point they more or less stopped too.

I probably did end up seeing 10-15 new releases this year--a few before the pandemic, a few more once theatres reopened (late summer? I can’t remember exactly--they’re closed again), and then supplemented that with a handful of TV-streamed films, like the Charlie Kaufman labyrinth. A year-end list would be meaningless, though: I liked the Michael Jordan extravaganza (which, if I’m honest, is less of a film than ESPN’s O.J. extravaganza), but midway through the list I’d be falling back on films I was basically indifferent to. So I’ll put that on hold for another year. Or two--the virus and various drug companies will decide that.

As a placeholder, here’s the list I submitted to a greatest-ever poll the ILX message-board is running in advance of the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, the one where Vertigo supplanted Citizen Kane at the top in 2012. You’re allowed to list up to 125 films. I’ve written before about my habit of watching my favourite films over and over again until I numb them into oblivion; a list of 125 for me would be at least half made up of such casualties. So I limited myself to 30--a Top 10, and another 20 I didn’t rank.

This is the first time I’ve done this since I joined Steven Rubio and Jeff Pike for a shared Facebook countdown in 2011 (literally the last time I said to myself, “Wow, isn’t Facebook great?”). I think about two-thirds of my new list is drawn from the Top 50 I assembled for that. The new additions are primarily guided by a) all the viewing I did in conjunction with writing You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen, and b) “prestige TV”--I hadn’t yet seen even one of these shows (the roll call should be familiar by now) in 2011, and I’ve been catching up ever since. Arguably the two most famous happen to be my two favourite; whether or not I should have included them here, that’s another question.

Which brings me to something I realized while putting together the new list: I don’t care anymore. I once thought of movie-going as a lifetime project, probably the most far-reaching and foundational one of my life, and that, over time, I’d eventually get around to seeing all the important films I needed to see. But it doesn’t, at the moment, feel like that project exists anymore. I want to say that this is mostly fallout from 2020, a temporary pause, but that sense of largeness has in fact been steadily eroding for years. I bought my first big-screen TV a decade ago, after which I was less committed to seeing everything in a theatre. Then all those TV shows I caught up with—when it became clear to me just how good some of them were, that scrambled everything up a little more. I left Toronto, significantly reducing my movie-going universe (two pretty-good rep theatres within an hour in either direction, about 20% of what was available to me in Toronto). And finally, COVID.

So I don’t really care that Mad Men and The Sopranos aren’t really films, or that Adventureland and The Perks of Being a Wallflower won’t be getting a single vote in the Sight & Sound poll (they won’t even get a second vote in the ILX poll). Writing in 2011, I issued an early warning that “Especially in the lower reaches of my list, I’ll have a few picks that no one’s going to mistake for art.” Ten years later, the lower reaches are moving up, the upper reaches are fading, and I’m including things that no one’s even going to mistake for films. And I’m okay with that.

1. Zodiac (2007)

2. Mad Men (2007-2015)

3. All the President’s Men (1976)

4. No Country for Old Men (2007)

5. Lost in America (1986)

6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

7. Nixon (1995)

8. Welfare (1975)

9. 20th Century Women (2016)

10. Advise and Consent (1962)

Adventureland (2009)

American Honey (2016)

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006)

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Boogie Nights (1997)

The Candidate (1972)

Casualties of War (1989)

Cold Water (1994)

Comfort and Joy (1984)

Double Indemnity (1944)

The 400 Blows (1959)

Goin’ Down the Road (1970)

Il Posto (1961)

Malcolm X (1992)

No Direction Home (2005)

Pather Panchali (1955)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

The Sopranos (1999-2007)

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

To Sir with Love (1967)

Partying Maskless with Rudy Giuliani and Vanilla Ice (2020)

This past Thursday marked my first year in St. Marys. Haven’t posted here since soon after I arrived, the decade-end lists Scott and I put together. I can’t remember how we did that, but I’m pretty sure it was pre-Zoom. 2020: as sequels go (to 2019, to all the other years before that), not great. Anyway, since then, I’ve been meaning to link to a bunch of things in a catch-up post.

1. A couple of weeks after the pandemic started (“started” as in the March 11 marker most people use), I walked around town taking photos of newly closed businesses in St. Marys and posted a photo album on Facebook. I also contacted the local newspaper about publishing the photos, but everybody turns into the New Yorker with me.

2. Scott took the photos and turned them into YouTube clips with some new software he purchased.

3. I turned the “You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen” blog into a book. (Title: You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen.) This led to much pandemic-related squabbling with Kindle.

Canada

U.S.

4. As he always does, Steven Rubio wrote about the book on his blog.

5. Jeff Pike, who did the Facebook movie countdown with Steven and I a decade ago, also did.

6. I did a phone interview with Richard Crouse.

7. Todd Burns conducted an e-mail interview for his Music Journalist Insider Substack blog.

8. Scott and I began a series of Zoom conversations based on the 107 songs listed in the book’s “clipography.” We’re close to halfway through.

Elsewhere, the election was finally called for Biden a week ago. I’ll try to post something related to that closer to the inauguration. Two of the election night highlights were Fox calling Arizona days before anyone else, and John Lewis’s district being the one that moved Biden into the lead in Georgia for the first time. After it became clear (late Wednesday?) Biden was going to win everything, I suggested on the ILX message board that one of the posters there, a guy who’s very good with GIFs and graphics and such, come up some visual with Trump and the ghosts of Lewis and John McCain.

No--Lewis was in heaven and McCain in hell, someone immediately assured me, implying it was sacrosanct to even mention them in the same sentence (“otmfm” someone else just as quickly chimed in, evidently some mysterious configuration of a silly and ubiquitous internet acronym that may be an ILX invention, I’m not sure).

No argument with Lewis, though I did ask for some clarification on this heaven and hell business. With McCain, a few things I know about him:

-- as a POW in Vietnam, he refused release unless those who served alongside him were granted the same

-- he had a big role in the savings and loan scandal of the late ‘80s

-- he fell in line with his party far more loyally than his carefully managed media persona (truth-telling, “maverick” moderate) would suggest

-- to jump-start a flailing presidential campaign, he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, arguably the most reckless thing ever done by someone running for president

-- he gave a very gracious concession speech when he lost

-- he more or less got out of his deathbed and cast the vote that saved the ACA (almost purely out of spite, I think, which is okay by me)

Good, bad, and points in between--a mixed bag, in other words, which is the case with most people.

I’ve said this before--many have--but consigning John McCain to hell is part of why Trump was elected in 2016. A small part, but somewhere in the mix. Because if you try to sell the idea that John McCain is the Worst Person in the World in 2008, then casually move onto the idea that Mitt Romney is the Worst Person in the World in 2012, then you invariably end up clearing the ground for the Actual Worst Person in the World in 2016. Basic boy-who-cried-wolf stuff. But it’s a way of thinking--of not thinking--very conducive to social media, a universe that isn’t big on the grey area.

Look Up Ahead Now (2020)

I’m taking the easy way out twice over: a decade-end list instead of a yearly Top 10, and a Skype conversation with Scott Woods* instead of written comments. (Easy for me, that is--Scott, as always, spent endless hours editing, rearranging, and soundtracking the Skype conversation into something resembling a podcast.) To reiterate something I wrote in the decade-end film post a few weeks ago--and elaborated upon in the first audio clip below--I’m reasonably sure there won’t be a similar list in 2029; as Pazz & Jop went, so did I.

1. “Inspector Norse,” Todd Terje (2012)

2. “Fountain Stairs,” Deerhunter (2010)

3. “It Is Not Meant to Be,” Tame Impala (2010)

4. “You Could Get Lost Out Here,” A.C. Newman (2012)

5. “Echelon,” Angel Haze (2014)

6. “How Can You Really,” Foxygen (2015)

7. “Bobby,” Alex G (2017)

8. “Driftin’ Back,” Neil Young (2013)

9. “Pizza King,” Wussy (2012)

10. “Down on My Luck,” Vic Mensa (2015)

11. “Adjustments,” Benoit & Sergio (2014)

12. “Apeshit,” Beyonce & Jay-Z (2018)

13. “Nothing Is Real,” Boards of Canada (2014)

14. “Sore Tummy,” Paws (2012)

15. “Ima Read,” Zebra Katz & Njena Reddd Foxxx (2012)

16. "Lookout," the Julie Ruin (2013)

17. “An Impression,” No Age (2014)

18. “Apoptosis,” Tall Friend (2017)

19. “Cheers (Drink to That),” Rihanna (2011)

20. “All Night,” Chance the Rapper (2016)

21. “Knowing We’ll Be Here,” Daniel Avery (2014)

22. “December 24,” Earl Sweatshirt (2018)

23. “212,” Azelia Banks (2011)

24. “Avant Gardener,” Courtney Barnett (2014)

25. “No Question,” Waxahatchee (2017)

*(Currently unavailable; will repost when and if I can.)

A Tremendous Way to Learn About the World (2020)

2010s: My Favourite Films

1. 20th Century Women (2017)

2. Best of Enemies (2015)

3. Boyhood (2014)

4. The Social Network (2010)

5. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

6. Carlos (2010)

7. American Honey (2016)

8. O.J. Simpson: Made in America (2016)

9. At Berkeley (2013)

10. Room 237 (2012)

11. The Promised Land (2012)

12. Inside Llewyn Davis (2014)

13. Rabbit Hole (2010)

14. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground (2019)

15. Design Canada (2018)

16. Mildred Pierce (2011)

17. Margaret (2011)

18. Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011)

19. Obit (2016)

20. Frances Ha (2012)/Mistress America (2015)/Maggie’s Plan (2015)

I can vouch for the first 11 or 12 of these; the rest involved a certain amount of guesswork, especially Bobby Fischer and Obit, neither of which I ever saw a second time. The three Greta Gerwig films at #20 are grouped together because I liked them all and could not tell you from memory which one is which. Most of these I lifted from yearly top ten lists I’ve been making since 2013; a few predate that, and for some reason American Honey wasn’t on either my 2016 or 2017 list. I don’t really have anything from 2019; I saw a Hot Docs screening of the Barbara Rubin documentary in 2018, and had it as my #1 for that year, but it’s listed as 2019 on IMDB. Of the new films I actually did see in 2019, the Miles Davis American Masters was probably my favourite. It falls just short of the decade list.

As I began my third or fourth rewatch of Mad Men recently, I said on the I Love Everything message board that I doubted there was a film from the 2010s that meant as much to me as Mad Men. 20th Century Women comes close, but I think that statement holds true. Carlos and Mildred Pierce are technically TV mini-series; not sure where I draw the line on what I feel is okay to list and what isn't. O.J. Simpson: Made in America also started life on TV, and I think Frederick Wiseman films like On Berkeley still get played on PBS somewhere between festival screenings and limited first runs. Honestly, I really don’t care about the relationship between Netflix and the film industry, the difference between a festival screening and an official release date, or any of that stuff. I either saw something or I didn’t, and it was--in my mind--either a film or it wasn’t.

I know I’d get grief on the same message board for the almost complete absence of non-English language films on my list. All I’ve got is Carlos*--I considered Eden, too, the Mia Hansen-Løve film from 2014 about an aspiring group of club DJs. It’s stayed in my mind for some reason, and I’ve been hoping to see it a second time. I didn’t really care for acclaimed films by Kiarostami or Weerasethakul, I again find Godard impenetrable (which, coming from an ornery old guy in his 80s, I do find admirable), and things like Holy Motors and Toni Erdmann held no appeal for me whatsoever.

I’d guess that I see fewer documentaries now than I did 10 years ago. I’ve probably settled in the neighborhood of half-and-half, which is close--8/20--to what’s on the list. I went with At Berkeley for Wiseman, but National Gallery or Ex Libris could have been there instead. I’ve started but haven’t finished Monrovia, Indiana--not sure about that one yet. Wiseman, about 11 months older than Godard, was my pick for greatest living filmmaker in an ILX poll a few years ago.

I usually don’t get much from the socially-conscious, more mainstream half of Gus Van Sant’s career--Good Will Hunting, Milk--but I’ve seen The Promised Land five or six times now. It won’t show up on any other decade-end lists; it came and went and left no trace. For me, it’s a beautifully modest echo of The China Syndrome, Norma Rae, and other such ‘70s films (one of Hal Holbrook’s last performances helps get that mood right).

Now that I’ve moved two hours out of the city, I very much doubt I’ll be able to put together a decade-end list 10 years from now, not unless some new kind of technology comes along that teleports me back to the Bloor and the Lightbox a couple of times a week. Last time around, as the Wussy song says.

*Which, come to think of it, is about 90% English too--so I guess I'm a complete middlebrow rube after all.

The Waves are Gone (2019)

2018 YEAR-END BALLOT

 1. “December 24,” Earl Sweatshirt: I like Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” but this gets the Gil-Scott Heron “Winter in America” mood more right than anything else I came across this year. (Which, my annual disclaimer, amounts to one percent of one percent of whatever hip-hop was out there in 2018.) It must be my shortest #1 ever at 1:46--I wish it went on for another seven or eight minutes. At the risk of sounding white-guy stupid, where does the opening genuine-dialect quote come from? I’ve googled it, looked up the album credits, nothing. The significance of December 24 escapes me too, but it feels right: aspirations, a plan, something that came up just short. Quote I came across in a Goon Sax interview: “Sad music is made for a reason and maybe it's to repurpose something you've gone through.”

2. “Sleep EZ,” Goon Sax: Spent a few days in the car this summer playing the Go-Betweens’ “Streets of Your Town” over and over again--they’re a blind spot for me, but a friend put it on a mix-CD. It especially resonated--deeply--when for some reason I had to make a trip into the small town I grew up in. Which is not all that far from where I live now...I digress. Took me a few songs for me to warm to the Goon Sax album--six, to be exact: “Strange Light,” the first one sung by Riley Jones, the woman in the band not related to the Go-Betweens--after which I liked most of the rest of it. I much prefer when Jones handles vocals; if you took her out of “Sleep EZ,” I think you’d have something in the neighborhood of the Violent Femmes. But I even like those parts of the song in context--“sinewy” comes to mind.

3. “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane),” Peggy Gou, and 6. “Beam Me Up,” Eris Drew & Octo Octa: I wade through a few dozen songs like this every year when I put together my ballot, in search of the one or two I love. I’m looking for something trancey but not too trancey (boring), serene but not too serene (Windham Hill), catchy but not too catchy (makes you want to strangle someone). Authentically mimicked soul vocals are usually a bad idea too. It’s a microscopically fine line, which always adds to my amusement as I skim-read, if I’m working from a niche-publication’s own year-end list, the capsule descriptions accompanying all the YouTube/Spotify links. People I’ve never heard of are designated as legends and colossuses, making triumphant returns after years in exile. Somewhere between 20-30% of the songs are designated as bangers; I haven’t yet figured out the precise contours of bangerdom. The best parts of “It Makes You Forget” are as catchy-trancey-serene as “Inspector Norse,” which has a decent chance of ending up as my favourite song of the decade, and “Beam Me Up” is worlds better than its very unpromising title.

4. “Skip,” Wussy,” and 5. “Apeshit,” Beyoncé/Jay-Z: For as long as Donald J. Trump is president, these two songs encapsulate how I want him to worm his way into popular music: not named, not even necessarily alluded to, but somehow there, lurking around the edges of a bad dream. I suppose there will be--or already has been, and I missed it--music that takes him on by name, but whatever I have heard has been clunky and obvious. I loved Wussy’s What Heaven Is Like--I could have listed any one of four or five songs, but in the end it came down to “Skip,” which most knocked me out the first time I played Heaven in the car (I can remember exactly where I was; I did not, Greil Marcus-like, pull over to collect my thoughts, just dialed up the volume and kept driving), or “Aliens in Our Midst,” their Twinkeyz cover. The Twinkeyz? Honest to god, never heard of them, but, if we can finesse our way around the lyric about the five-year-old friend who likes to dress in his sister’s clothes, my school’s music teacher and I are hoping to perform it at a future school assembly with my grade 3 class. (We’re very enlightened, promise; parents and principals sometimes have different ideas.) As for “Skip,” I can understand why Christgau says it’s the only Wussy song he’s ever hated (referring to an earlier EP version that I may or may not have--if I do, it went right past me and was filed away). They’ve never recorded anything like it before. I’m having a harder time writing about “Apeshit” than anything else on this list. (I finished with the rest of my ballot two days ago.) It’s like 17 different things colliding at once. I did what I don’t often do, looked up the lyrics, and they don’t help. These are two of the most famous, most glamorous, and richest people in the world seemingly flaunting their wealth, but I know it can’t--or hope and assume it can’t--be that simple. And Jay-Z is carping about the Super Bowl and the Grammys, just like he carped about radio airplay (how quaint) on “99 Problems,” my #1 of 2004. Beyoncé’s “Get off my dick” might have been a big deal a decade ago, but I know she’s throwing that out there after many others have cleared that space for her. (The cultural importance of Beyoncé--meaning she’s somebody people write think-pieces about—has been, for me, more disproportionate to the actual value of her music than anybody I can think of the past couple of decades. I liked her at the Inaugural Ball and voted for “Naughty Girl,” weirdly enough, at the bottom of the same Top 10 as “99 Problems.” Past that*, I find her completely without interest.) There’s something much bigger here than any of that, though, something in the immensity and sinister weirdness of the sound. If “December 24” is “Winter in America,” then “Apeshit” is “Smiling Faces Sometimes.” I find it extremely unsettling.

7. “Untitled Original 11383,” John Coltrane: I wish this had a better title--I wish it had a title--but this is the only time I’ll ever be able to cast a semi-legitimate vote for John Coltrane, and I don’t want to pass that up. To my ears, this is closer to the first part of “A Love Supreme” than anything else on Both Directions at Once (there are moments that sound like they might have later been incorporated into “Acknowledgement”), so it’s the track that most stands out. My favourite music-related moment of the whole year might have been seeing a commercial for Both Directions at Once on CNN one Sunday morning. No voice-over, as I recall, just music, the album cover, and some text conveying that there was a new John Coltrane album out. It felt like...especially in the context of seeing it on CNN, a network where people have spent the last two years yelling at each other for five hours every night...it felt like a magisterial rebuke to what’s referred to in No Country for Old Men as the dismal tide.

8. “Mileage,” Playboi Carti: I don’t totally understand--sometimes I’m not sure if I even partially understand--why something like this evidently gets a pass (if there was controversy, I missed it), while half the rest of the world gets disappeared because of something it says or tweets. I know there are different rules for art, and for presidents. (Except when there aren’t.) Plus it’s pretty, and has clever rhymes. Unless you’re Miley Cyrus.

9. “Miki Dora,” Amen Dunes: I don’t listen to music to learn stuff--not stuff that can be put into words, anyway. But reading up on this song’s eponymous subject was fascinating: a guy from the ‘50s who helped popularize surfing (he’s in every one of those Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello movies) but who supposedly hated the commercialization of what he’d helped usher in, and who conveyed his disgust by acting out in various ways--swastikas, crucifixion imagery, crime, exile. I’m old enough to remember when there’d be an occasional surfing segment on Wide World of Sports; also, Laura Blears Ching in Playboy...I digress. I came across this one interesting quote from the president of the Hang-Ten Chapter of Malibu Surfers just after Dora’s swastika incident: “You had a surfer on one side that was bad, and you had a group of surfers on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now.” I like the sound of “Miki Dora” fine--it starts off like a dreamy, singer-songwriter version of “Come as You Are”--but it’s primarily the story that draws me in.

10. “Love Me Right,” Amber Mark: The daughter of the ghost of MoKenStef. I’m a million miles away from that helicopter day, so the most I can get from this kind of song nowadays is for it to remind me of a time when I naturally gravitated to this kind of song. Which is a nice feeling, and this is the first thing in a few years to push that button.

*A friend has reminded me that I also voted for Lady Gaga & Beyoncé’s "Telephone," in no small part because of its wild, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!-inspired video; "Apeshit"'s video is some kind of an achievement, too.

Someone Else's Drunken Nightmare (2019)

Because I watched a fair amount of new TV (on bootlegged DVDs--catching up with the world can only be done in micro-steps with me) this year, I thought for sure I had seen fewer new films than normal. It felt like I’d sometimes go weeks without getting out to the movies. Evidently not--saw the same 40 or so I see every year.

I counted anything as new that a) had an official release date of no earlier than October 2017 on IMDB, and b) where I was pretty sure that it didn’t show up in Toronto until 2018 (TIFF screenings aside, because who cares?).

My Top 10:

1. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground

2. Design Canada

3. The King

4. Mid90s

5. United Skates

6. If Beale Street Could Talk

7. First Reformed

8. BlacKkKlansman

9. Studio 54

10. Battle of the Sexes/Vice

Not a great year. Past the top two or three, I’m not sure if anything there would make my list in a good year--I liked them all to one degree or another, but often it’s a film that either falls into the fine-but-somewhat-overrated category (First Reformed) or gets a low-expectations/not-bad-at-all bump (the tie at #10 especially). The only thing that actually caught me by surprise--although the title certainly caught my attention--was Jonah Hill’s Mid90s. I quite liked it; many wouldn’t. I still haven’t seen Roma. Finding out that it’s set in the early ‘70s (which I much preferred to the mid-‘90s, even though I was pretty happy then, too) guarantees that I will. And yes, I realize Badfinger and Todd Rundgren won’t be on the soundtrack.

Some rough groupings for the rest (based on memory, because it’s too much work to check my ILX ratings):

Okay documentaries: The Fourth Estate, Mr. Fish: Cartooning from Deep End, Here to Be Heard: The Story of the Slits, The Beatles, Hippies and Hells Angels: Inside the Crazy World Of Apple, RBG, Filmworker, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, My Generation, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.,  Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, Maria by Callas*

Okay Not-Documentaries: Unsane, Paterno, A Quiet Place, Eighth Grade (didn’t like it nearly as much as everyone else), Shock and Awe, A Simple Favor, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Not-Okay Documentary: Fahrenheit 11/9 (embarrassing in a couple of places, even for Moore)

A Documentary Would Have Been Better: Borg Vs. McEnroe, Nico, 1988

Fashion (I Want to Understand...): The Gospel According to Andre, McQueen, Always at the Carlyle (sort of counts--rich people dressed in expensive clothes)

What the Fuck Did I Just See?: You Were Never Really Here, Sorry to Bother You (both worth puzzling over)

Rogue Politicians: Chappaquiddick, The Front Runner (the better of the two)

Diverting Junk: Red Sparrow

Waste of Time: Ocean’s Eight, White Boy Rick, The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Drawing a Blank: Flower

I just found out today (after googling the title + Toronto) that the film I most wanted to see this year, Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, screened for three nights at the Bloor just before Halloween. I can’t believe I missed that--I keep close tabs on the Bloor schedule. The only explanation I can come up with is that I didn’t know about the film yet and the nondescript title slipped by me. I’m a little heartsick about this, knowing how iffy a second chance will be.

*Saw this very late in the year; I didn't post about it in ILX's "last (x) movies" thread, so I missed it here, too. Could probably have included it my Top 10.