Angelo Badalamenti, "Twin Peaks Theme" (1990)

(listen)

I have a lot of memories and associations with this, not least how much the Pacific Northwest has become my home. I remember how exciting and what a novelty it was at that time for something with such a high profile—and so interesting—to be explicitly set in this region. Then the TV show itself turned out to be such a sensation, so weird and freaky and funny all at once, and became associated with strangely high spirits and anticipation too (compare The X-Files). But my favorite moment with all this happened on a winter night many years later, in those bad Bush years, when I stepped into a late-night bookstore insomniac and bleary and they had just started playing the Twin Peaks soundtrack album. I could not figure out what it was. It was the most beautiful feeling, a prolonged extended déjà vu. I became acutely aware that it was raining outside and very dark, but the lights of the storefronts across the street were visible, bars and a pharmacy and a pizza takeout. And of things like how the rain streaked against the window and what that did to the lights and what it sounded like when cars or now and then a truck drove by. It changed the whole scene and mood and I surreptitiously watched the other patrons, who sometimes seemed to be moving and swaying to the music. I suspect, musicologically speaking, it's pretty primitive stuff. Yet so evocative too. I skulked around the bookstore some 20 minutes and finally gave up and had to ask the clerk what it was. The answer was not surprising.

City Lights (1931)

#1: City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

I realized later that I probably could have put Citizen Kane here and maybe even pulled it off. I got kind of cute with these last five picks—an embedded Top 5 for my #5, a four-hour movie for #4, a made-up trilogy for #3, and a matched pair of stellar performances for #2. I wanted my #1 to represent a singular, multifaceted talent at the top of his form, and that's Orson Welles and Citizen Kane without a doubt.

But it's also Charlie Chaplin and City Lights. The guy wrote it, directed it, edited it, stars in it, and he wrote all the music too. And it's great music. The talkies had already arrived and his moment was slipping away, but Chaplin still had a few good ones in him—his best, in fact—along with some strikingly innovative ideas about the place and purpose of sound. This is not a silent picture; it is, as billed, "a comedy romance in pantomime," and sound is a significant part of it even if dialogue isn't, for which he still uses (sparingly) the intertitle cards. It is original in ways that few pictures not done by Chaplin are.

Falling Off the Sky (2012)

What is basically the first album from the dB's in 25 years (and arguably only the second in 30) has turned out to be a welcome surprise on many levels, not least that it so good, with a set that sounds as close to a return to the mind meld between Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey as we could have hoped for. It feels as if they are well aware of their strengths and weaknesses both, playing effectively within their limitations. The Wikipedia entry makes it "jangle pop/power pop" and that's as good a way as any to start on this mess. But don't forget the overarching indie aesthetic, which remains important as constraining and ultimately defining element. The songs are verse/chorus/verse with lines that rhyme and stories about being in love, finding it, losing it, appreciating it, thinking about it a lot, still. No late midlife crisis this, as often as not evidently at peace with its decisions, living with them, unlike the youthful angst none of us can help, and which they rightly and neatly step the hell away from. Instead it's just about getting down to the matter of working with what they have, the stuff of their lives and memories and a persistent way of getting songs to fit together and work. It's much more often "beautiful" than "interesting," which I count as the happiest surprise of all. As we all know by now, or should, "nothing lasts," and so it was hard to know what the old crew had in mind and/or were capable of. It turns out to be pretty simple. They are still here, still in command of their various powers, still productive as a unit, with no airs or pretensions. The sequencing has some feel of a series of careful, deliberate statements: "That Time Is Gone," "Before We Were Born," "The Wonder of Love," it opens, moving quickly to the sublime, with soaring melodies and wide open singing and harmonies. Every track here is solid. I never would have guessed the dB's had another album in them. There might be more. But even if there's not this is as strikingly good a way of going out as any other I can think of at the moment. Feels like going home in a way, and infinitely sweet when it catches you in the right mood.

Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1993)

John Lydon here takes on the difficult and neverending task of "correcting the record," in this case the highly visible, and visibly pored over, history of the Sex Pistols. He was a little late to the party, trailing 1989's Lipstick Traces and 1991's England's Dreaming, which effectively set the outlines, thanks in part to a combination of Malcolm McLaren's arguable overparticipation and Lydon's own underparticipation in those projects. But then Lydon practically compounds the problem with this "authorized autobiography" (though a nice touch, that) "with Keith and Kent Zimmerman," which casts an air of the smug and self-satisfied. It feels as if Lydon considers himself ultimately above all this, and so he is. There is minimal effort. It's basically an oral history with Lydon's voice overwhelmingly dominating the transcriptions. For me, if anything, it tends to undercut his case, which is powerful on its face. As Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols he is the first anyone would think of as the chief player in that drama, with Sid Vicious playing a critical supporting role. But the books by Greil Marcus and Jon Savage make powerful and persuasive cases for the importance of McLaren and, rather more incidentally, for Glen Matlock, who made significant contributions as a songwriter. Lydon comes off in this autobiography as a decent human being and an interesting enough cultural figure, sarcastic and radical and embittered though not unpleasantly so. But he seems more football fan than rock star somehow, and somehow this regular guy thing struck me as a tough sell. Certainly Lydon has carried on the most interesting post-Pistols career (though I don't think McLaren is actually that far behind him). But many of Lydon's arguments against the significance of, say, McLaren, or Situationism, seem to boil down to "Nah-nah, can't prove it. I was there and I say not," etc., without producing anything like a satisfying or credible alternative explanation for the hurricanes of phenomena that swirled around the Sex Pistols when they existed. Lydon could well be the one telling the truth, but his version seems by far the least interesting—thus, perhaps, the most convincing in one way. But still, if Lydon is going to stake his legacy on his vision and his words he might have considered taking on the work of composing them rather than simply switching on a tape recorder and speaking into it as the whim moved him. This is a bit disappointing.

In case it's not at the library.

A Foreign Sound (2004)

It occurred to me for the first time recently, going back to this elusive and fascinating cover songs album by Caetano Veloso, the great Brazilian singer and songwriter, that the title could well have been plucked out of the compelling word salad of one of the bravest and most audacious covers here (of many), Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)": "So don't fear if you hear / A foreign sound to your ear / It's alright, Ma," etc. At 22 tracks, this album is packed full, arms wide open, Walt Whitman style, I-am-large—I-contain-multitudes, with room for Fred Astaire, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Kurt Cobain, and Morris Alpert, which is the track order for the first five songs, so you know how fast it switches and what caps it reaches for: "The Carioca," "So in Love," "Always," "Come as You Are," and "Feelings." For every standard such as "Summertime" there's at least one mostly unexpected pick with an interesting history or twist: "Cry Me a River," which may or may not be associated with Barbra Streisand now but Julie London owned it first, "Nature Boy," a Nat King Cole song later covered by Big Star, "(Nothing But) Flowers," late Talking Heads, on and on it goes. In many ways it's a perfect freak show of references. But in case anyone was still wondering, Veloso proves over and over what a shrewd, insinuating, and overpowering performer he can be. As suggested by the songs already mentioned, there's a lot of extravagance in the choices, but after that it's strictly professional, with a variety of outfits assembled for the purposes of each song, some of which are just Veloso singing and playing guitar and others with big orchestras. But at the same time, from all these sessions, it also feels like an organic whole, more than arguably it has any right to. The bob and weave of these songs can be hypnotic, and there is much to be taken from close listening—the best touches are also the finest, sneaking up on you, often in Veloso's phrasings and scans. So many of these concept projects, such as tribute albums or a covers album such as this, often look better on paper but somehow don't translate, except the occasional inspired track. I admit I had my concerns seeing how wild A Foreign Sound can swing, from Nirvana to Elvis to DNA. It can go some pretty crazy places. But Veloso always seems to know where he is and what he is doing, so let it play, baby, I say let it play.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

USA, 103 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Carrie Fisher, Barbara Hershey, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, Tony Roberts, Julie Kavner, Lewis Black, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Joanna Gleason

One of the best formulations I know of the appeal of the Marx Brothers is found late in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, his best movie of the '80s. In an implausible scene of suicide considered and averted (a Woody Allen staple even then), he makes the familiar case for Groucho and crew—inspired zaniness equated to life affirmation, that sort of thing. It is of a piece with the usual accolades for the Marx Brothers, and others such as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Martin and Lewis, all that comedy of bygone times lost on me beyond certain undeniable quaint charms (e.g., Laurel and Hardy music). What's interesting to me, perhaps because I can't appreciate the Marx Brothers the way Woody Allen and so many others do, is how well it stands in as approximation of the way I feel about Woody Allen movies, and nearly as much as ever.

Even the bad ones validate ideals I hold dear—may even have learned in part absorbing Woody Allen's '70s movies—an irresistible vision of an urban lifestyle constructed around cultural markers and cityscapes, and at deeper levels identity, and ultimately alienation. Life, this self-absorbed and conflicted Woody Allen view seems to tell us, is about emotional connections, the rejection of commerce, and privilege, in about equal proportions. Or, as he puts it in Annie Hall, the world can be divided into the horrible and the miserable, and the best any of us can hope for is to be among the miserable. Which, in turn, is itself eternally belied by the easygoing roll and tumble of Woody Allen's jokes and situations, second nature by the time of Hannah and Her Sisters, enabling him in fact to pull off the rather remarkable stunt that I think distinguishes it.

Chris Bell, "Though I Know She Lies" (1974)

(listen)

Chris Bell's one and only solo album came out in 1992 but he had been gone nearly 14 years by then, dead at 27 from a late night auto accident in East Memphis. He was a founding member of Big Star, mostly estranged from the band after the first album as Alex Chilton came more to take the central role. I Am the Cosmos truly sounds like a lost Big Star album. In fact, it also helps explain some of the curves and bends of Chilton's own post-Big Star career, which veered much more wildly, from real good bluesy stuff to effective noise squalls and back again to these dark nights of the adolescent soul, at which Big Star particularly excelled. In my opinion Third/Sister Lovers is as good as it ever got. That was long after Chris Bell had left the band, but Cosmos, recorded at approximately the same time, is nevertheless at the heart of the project, it can't be denied. Both albums are possessed of a similar eerie spirit, disconnected lost souls wandering the audio hollows of a recording studio. "Though I Know She Lies" closes the original '92 release, letting Bell retreat all the way into himself as the story turns blankly naturalistic, and thus bleak. As far as I'm concerned it's the deepest point reached by the album, which is otherwise the usual story about wanting a girl, told from multiple points of view, enlarged thematically as unrequited love, obsession, depression, yearning and failure to connect, even Christian faith. Just another story about a guy who liked a girl who didn't like him, and there are a lot of those. But seen from certain angles Bell makes it look like looking into the abyss.

Scenes From a Marriage (1973)

#2: Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)

In many ways I grew up with this movie; on an emotional level, I mean that literally. Properly speaking, it's more of a television mini-series—and something of an event at that when it ran on Swedish television in the spring of 1973. Stories are that the entire country stopped to watch each weekly episode (one per week on the same day and time is still a good way to look at it). The first version that I saw in the mid-'70s was the chopped-down cut made for a U.S. theatrical release, which reduced it from its six-part 300 minutes to a still-long 167 minutes and also dubbed all the dialogue into English. I was 19 or 20, and mostly just bored.

But some 15 years later, working my way through the thickets of a divorce, I saw that same version again on a VHS tape from the library and it all but did me in then and there. I have since seen the theatrical version without the dubbing, and eventually, when Criterion did it right as they do so much right, the entire mini-series, which of course I would now recommend without hesitation as the version to see. But I can say from experience that even the bowdlerized, dubbed version is worth a look, and I wouldn't hesitate if it was my only option.

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

A lot of the features I have come to associate with Philip Roth were already in evidence in his first book, a collection of six stories published when Roth was 26. It is self-consciously concerned with "the Jewish experience in America" (or at least New Jersey) as literary theme. He is willing to expose various human foibles to the point where already, even here, people have tended to characterize him as "self-hating Jew." It can be acidly funny. It is always well-written—Roth's gifts as stylist are underestimated at one's peril. And it won a National Book Award, the beginning of a stream of such awards across his career that have left him waiting rather impatiently for his Nobel prize. It is an unseemly position of privilege he has come to occupy, and in such a context this early work does start to feel remarkably slight and unable to bear such weight. "Goodbye, Columbus," the story long enough to be considered a novella, was first published in The Paris Review (more privilege). To me it's actually more about class and the full-scale flight then underway to the suburbs, telling the story of a summer romance between the scrappy young narrator from Newark and a wealthy, haughty, and disaffected girl from Short Hills. The romance is reasonably convincing, much more so than the Newark details, which indeed reek of self-hatred, except it seems less about being Jewish than simply resenting impoverishment. The rest of the stories are more obviously (and almost reflexively, it sometimes seems, by rote exercise) exploring "the Jewish experience in America" (or at least New Jersey). They seem to me almost painfully timebound and dare I say irrelevant: broad farce about a suicide gesture, in the Army now, generational changing of the guard, etc. They hold more interest now, collectively, simply as the opening scene in what has become a rather long and mostly interesting play, Philip Roth's career. This is hardly the one above all others to read by him if you're only going to read one (I consider that to be Sabbath's Theater), nor the place to start if you're going to make a project of him (I'm not sure myself about that one). But if you're going to make a project of him, this has certainly got to be on the list.

In case it's not at the library.

Dirt Track Date (1995)

This creased my attention about the time I was publishing a fanzine, came through the mails. I warmed to it a lot, having no clue what it was beyond the self-evident razor-sharp unit on display with full command of Southern boogaloo, from every pore. Digging around on the Internet for a little more information about Southern Culture on the Skids and Dirt Track Date, it appears it's the fifth of some dozen or more albums, including live sets, a covers album, so on so forth, and generally considered one of the best. So it appears at least I was infatuated with the right one (or that somebody sent me the right one) of a big bunch of choices, 1986-present: Southern-fried varieties of rockabilly, boogie woogie, and all the usual blues variations, done up to a tee with more or less straight faces, at least the music. This is a very fine band. The music is down and dirty and persistently insinuating, raw and rocking and a pleasure loud, all the things we know to say about the irresistible albums, and this is one of those for me. Overlaid on top of the grooves is a saucy wide-ranging psychotronic array of gestures, ridiculous science fiction and monster movies, Ed Roth hot rods, trailer culture, the usual freedoms of a certain vein of boozy devil-may-care. At that point, the jokes get nearly as good as the sizzling music, as indicated by some of the choice titles: "Skullbucket" (that's for an instrumental), "White Trash," "Fried Chicken and Gasoline," "8 Piece Box." But note that the jokes would not be so good if the music were not so unspeakably fine. That's where it all starts here, moving with spirit and attitude from groove to groove, approximately the Cramps times the B-52's (but these things are always so hard to calibrate with any accuracy, my appreciation for the Blasters is reflected in this mess too), 14 gem tracks in a row, each and every one dead on the money hot and full of itself and ready to go again. And the band evidently looked and saw all was so good they closed the album on the title song, featuring five whole minutes of pure dirt track din ("demolition derby figure eight"), engines droning away in and out of range, tires squealing, and not a whisper of music either. That takes a little getting used to, until you know that's the way they end the album. It is otherwise all pure pleasure.