Sideways (2004)

USA, 126 minutes 
Director: Alexander Payne
Writers: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Photography: Phedon Papamichael
Music: Rolfe Kent
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh

Everything in this dire romantic comedy, from the preoccupations of the two losers who occupy center stage to the myriad perfectly observed details of California life to the insipid jazzy soundtrack, is just right. Paul Giamatti with his wonderfully swallowed guttural growl is proficient as ever as Miles, a junior high English teacher, wannabe novelist, and wine-snob drunkard watching his life fall apart from his own self-pity. He is usually annoying, and often wrenching. His buddy Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, is even more annoying and equally affecting as a commitment-phobic sex addict and two-bit actor. Old college friends, the two have little to connect them any longer beyond low-level golf skills, compulsive lying, and a shared sense of profound disappointment with themselves and their lots. But their affection for one another is genuine, not desperate, as becomes evident over the course of the week-long trip through California's wine tourist country prior to Jack's doomed wedding that makes up the bulk of the movie. In form it's thus a species of road movie, but for me in many ways it updates the Woody Allen I appreciated from the late '70s and Hannah and Her Sisters, the Chekhovian impulse for mild, occasionally discomfiting set pieces of grown-ups (who are also children, which is all of us) grappling with the pains and complexities of romance and life and meaning. Virginia Madsen as Maya, a sensitive and intelligent recently divorced woman who works as a waitress in the wine country while she pursues a degree in horticulture, somehow lifts the whole thing a notch higher even as her character raises the stakes. With her own interest in wine, Maya is drawn to something in Miles—more likely that's a fantasy of director/writer Alexander Payne, but set that aside for the moment. The conversations between Miles and Maya as they find themselves falling into each other's orbits, the discussions of interests and motivations and dreams, are impossible. Do people really talk like that? Well, they do here, and the conversations are exquisite and endearing, the movie's unbearably attractive heart, the point where my guard dropped all on its own and left me vulnerable to the shenanigans. Call it the tenor of Madsen's voice. The resolution that's offered would have to be categorized as fantasy, but it's a relief from the surprising degree of pain of the closing scenes—Giamatti always has the face to carry off such anguish, it's basically his bread and butter—and ultimately leaves a beautiful note to end on: Madsen's lovely voice again, and the way she addresses Miles, speaking to an answering machine.

Beggars Banquet (1968)

"Street Fighting Man" In which the curtain goes up on the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band 1968-1972 (though I suspect the Stooges challenged them in their latter supremacy, but that's a discussion for another time). Having spent several years persistently and purposefully dogging the shadows of the Beatles—up to and including a "retirement" from touring, if you can believe that now, though for vastly different and even slightly sordid reasons (but we wouldn't have it any other way, would we?)—and having effectively sidelined their one non-traditionalist, founding status or no, the Glimmer Twins and crew here step out with all the confidence they were born with and otherwise accumulated, and simply play. Loud. Menacing. Cocky. Slick and rough all at once, like virtually nothing anyone had ever heard before, though all the sources remain transparent enough. Some of the transition may be glimpsed intermittently, through the fabled glass darkly like, in Jean-Luc Godard's typically infuriating quasi-documentary art film of the time, Sympathy for the Devil, where they are seen slowly woodshedding the details of the title sound—the title of the movie, I mean. But even though that odd 6:26 workout would open the album and seem to indicate a statement of purpose, it's the 3:18 romp that opens the vinyl side 2, "Street Fighting Man," that's more the genuine article, certainly in its attack and implicit statement of purpose. The lyrics are the usual pack of lies, as they are throughout the Stones' catalog. That's just what they do, and likely why Jagger prefers mumbling, muttering, and all the other strategies he uses to obfuscate what he's "saying." That doesn't mean, however, that it doesn't work. Remember: you must never underestimate what this band is capable of.

12 X 5 (1964)

"Time Is on My Side" One of the things that never fails to astonish me about the Stones is how quickly they sounded so self-assured—and so good. This is only their second album (approximately: as with the Beatles and other transcontinental artists of the time, their US and UK releases run down two separate, imperfectly matched trails) and they are basically all the way there, a first-rate blues band with a knack for the surprising effect, well past simply aping the old 78s and Chess singles they had spent their brief lifetimes collecting, whether it's the sounds Keith Richards and Brian Jones casually wring, the odd vocal conceit of Mick Jagger's that is unfailingly dead-on, and always, always the solid bottom of the rhythm section, which even in 1964 was clearly going to be one of the all-time best in the business. (For comparison, see the Animals of the time, or even better, or worse, the Who.) Already the Stones had no place to go but down, but incredibly, they had a long road ahead of them of continuing to go up. Consider: this album was just about the point when manager Andrew Loog Oldham had begun to convince Jagger and Richards, who would eventually become their own personal hit-making factory, to even try their hand at songwriting. Except for three fledgling efforts, this is an album of covers. But I defy anyone to point to any album of covers not by the Rolling Stones that is even remotely as confident and accomplished. (What's more, they've got more than one of these from the early days.)

Le Grand Meaulnes (1912)

Upon considering a tour of the "revised version" of The Magus by John Fowles, published circa 1978, I found Fowles himself in his introduction making reference to Le Grand Meaulnes as a significant source for his own novel of impossible mysteries and paradox. I had never heard of Le Grand Meaulnes. It turns out that author Alain-Fournier only had time to compose this one slender volume; he was subsequently called to serve with the French in World War I, where he perished shortly before his 28th birthday. The novel tells a strangely toned story of an adolescent student at a boarding school in the French countryside who, one night of a full moon, goes out for a ramble and comes across a small village in the throes of a strange and lovely masquerade festival. He enjoys various adventures, finds a girl for whom he falls hard, and in brief a good time is had by all. But the funny thing is that once he finds his way back to the boarding school he can't seem to find that village again. In time, he enlists his companion, the narrator of this novel, to help him find it. Both continue the effort but are singularly unsuccessful. The resolution is a bit anticlimactic—it's clearly a first novel—but it's a pleasant enough ramble itself getting there. And there's something hard to put one's finger on that is very weird and altogether unsettling about the whole thing.

In case it's not at the library.

Rising (1995)

This is fully equipped with the usual caterwauling and yelping, particularly on the lengthy title track, though infinitely mellowed and sharpened as the times had finally caught up to her sound, her instincts and vision. Furthermore, it comes with a working band, IMA (Japanese for "now"), which includes son Sean playing guitar. And a fine band it is too, as you can hear. I was fortunate enough to be able to see them play a small club in Seattle in 1996 in support of this, and in many ways the whole thing was a perfect comedy of mutual admiration, soft and warm as a holiday with loved ones, the love flowing freely and from all sides. First there were the members of the audience marveling simply at being there, in the immediate vicinity of and actually standing in the wash of sound as it occurred, pouring from this tiny middle-aged Japanese woman who stepped to the microphone in all the din and chaos and let it rip. And Sean, of course—why, he looks like both of them! We were like ridiculous doting relatives. But the supremely comical moment was when Soundgarden's Kim Thayil was invited onstage to stand in for a couple of numbers. And there was Sean—what? 21 at the time?—gaping at a hero the way we had been gaping at him and his mother. Soundgarden! Seattle! Yoko Ono! Those sounds! That thundering rhythm section! Heavy chords! Screech! On and on it went. What a lovely night.

The 39 Steps (1935)

UK, 86 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Charles Bennett, Ian Hay
Photography: Bernard Knowles
Cast: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, John Laurie, Helen Haye, Frank Cellier, Wylie Watson

Positively straining at the limitations imposed by the stodgy '30s talkie technology, it's probably fair enough to characterize this as a cracking good yarn. Marked by paranoia, murder, intrigue, the usual gang of Hitchcock's mysterious spies, and a setting that sprawls across the UK, from London to Scotland and back again, there's not much you could do to improve the bold strokes of this script—unlikely coincidences, outlandish resolution, and all. It gets off to a brisk start as a strange London music hall performance is interrupted by gunshots. Leaving the venue, Richard Hannay, played by Robert Donat, appears to find himself getting picked up by a Garbo-like woman. played by Lucie Mannheim, who asks if she can go home with him. There she drops hints of an incredible spy plot in which, she says, she has now involved him. He politely feeds and listens to her. It's all quite chaste—we know from earlier Hitchcock fare such as Blackmail that he wasn't afraid to veer toward the sordid if it suited his purpose—and Hannay never believes a word. Later that night she reappears with a knife in her back, clutching a map, and collapses across him (as a gentleman, of course, he had put her up in his bed while he took the living room couch). This would seem to bolster her story, and in any case he's now likely to be accused of the murder, so he does what any sensible character in a Hitchcock film would do: flees, and tries to makes sense of the cryptic clues that she left behind. Along the way he finds any number of close shaves along with true love, neither of which comes without their various difficulties. Will he evade the police? Will he ever get to the bottom of this mystery? What do you think?

Season of Glass (1981)

"I Don't Know Why" All right, let's talk about Yoko Ono. Like most Beatles fan I thought her an unwelcome intrusion in the messy conclusion of the band, though I never hated her the way some did and certainly didn't blame anything on her. I've never had much use for such projects as Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins, her collaboration with John Lennon better known for its cover of the couple in full-frontal nudity—it's still painfully unlistenable to me. Her '70s solo projects came with isolated moments (I knew enough of her champions to get fairly steady exposure), although their proportion to the noisy dross was ultimately way too low to be cost-effective for me. But I thought, and still think, that "The Ballad of John and Yoko" was one of the best late Beatles hits, and anyway, John Lennon by then was my favorite Beatle. Who was I to begrudge him his personal choices? (Who was anyone?) In 1980, I thought her half of Double Fantasy was almost embarrassingly subpar to Lennon's, and wished they'd each taken a side rather than alternating tracks; it was too much work to listen to the thing, either lifting and replacing the needle constantly, or sitting through the untoward interruptions to Lennon's amazing return. And then came the catastrophe, and a few months later this. I was afraid to listen to it for more than a year. When I finally did, I found that suddenly the rough edges and harsh textures and raw thrust of her sound had found focus and purpose—expressing an entirely appropriate rage, working through grief, dealing with the shock and pain of an unimaginable event. She did so as an artist, with dignity and courage. Entirely unexpectedly, she also appeared to have absorbed enough of Lennon's sensibility to make it feel like the collaboration that never really occurred. It stands as a startling and genuine fusion of artists, fleeting but real, the very thing I think Lennon sought all his life, and as such it's almost as unbearably sad as it is heartening. It also provides catharsis for anyone who cared. From that point on I believed in her at every level, and I still do.

Different Class (1996)

I read somewhere that fans of Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys would be sure to appreciate Jarvis Cocker and Pulp. You didn't have to tell me any more than that. I signed on right away, though in the end I was as mystified by the comparison as by others I've heard with the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure. At least I like Pulp, and quite a lot. Especially this little bitter pill. Don't hesitate on account of the bitterness. That's strictly limited to the lyrics—the storyline of "Common People," for example: "And then in 30 seconds time she said / 'I want to live like common people / I want to do whatever common people do / I want to sleep with common people / I want to sleep with common people like you' / Well what else could I do? / I said 'I'll see what I can do' / I took her to a supermarket." (Bitterness of course never precludes humor, and we will be examining a cover version of this song soon enough, one that very nearly outdoes this, or does.) There's sugarcoating too: the music is all upbeat, almost chirpy, capable of pealing off lusty rounds of "la-la la-la la-la-la" without demeaning the general tone. Plus it features a bottom that can whomp you good, gorgeous guitar fills, and numerous turns to a dance throb that's never gonna let you down. Except for a little matter of looks, the better comparison here may be to Bryan Ferry by way of Martin Fry and back again, filtered through David Bowie sobbing. One look at Jarvis Cocker and you know he's all business. He has to be.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004)

I don't normally go in for this kind of thing—fantasy and magic in a historical British setting—but somehow I ended up with a copy of it and somehow one day I opened it up and started reading. It's big, positively epic, and so suitable for the long wintertime evenings. Maybe that was it. At any rate, it's certainly worthwhile. I would say don't believe the hype about the second coming of Jane Austen. Susanna Clarke sets a nice equable tone, but she doesn't bring off that much of a sense of post-Enlightenment 18th century simply by replicating some of the eccentric spellings ("chuse," "shew," "sopha," "scissars," etc., etc.). But that's quibbling in the face of her larger achievement—a sweeping, breathtaking alternative history of Britain that incorporates an entirely unexpected element of magic. And that's "real" magic as opposed to stage magic, both of which are discussed and debated among the scholars who stalk this heavily "documented" (that is, liberally footnoted) narrative, which recounts the emergence of two "real" magicians during the period of the Napoleonic wars, after Britain has endured centuries without any such. In Clarke's universe, a golden era of magic in Britain took place circa the 13th and 14th centuries. (Merlin, it turns out, from a century or two before that, was just a relatively minor magician in the larger scheme—one simple example of Clarke's ability to be thoroughly comprehensive in her invention.) The big kahuna in her story is a mysterious figure known simply as the Raven King, and it’s testament to the authority Clarke brings to bear (or perhaps just to my gullibility) that I had to turn to Wikipedia frequently to sort out what was historical fact from what was Clarke's imagination. As a figure in the novel, the Raven King grows from an incidental passing reference to an imposing presence almost imperceptibly, as the scope of the story gradually establishes itself, until he becomes as terrifying and overwhelming to the reader as to anyone living inside this novel. There are fairies here too, which though by and large as spritely and charming as even their most conventional reputations have it, nonetheless don't mean particularly well by us. In fact, they are downright creepy across the breadth of this extremely impressive tale. And that brings me to what I think I like best about Clarke's novel. Unlike the Harry Potter books, which may or may not have set the stage for something like this, this is not a story for children, and in the end it's not particularly light-hearted, let alone frivolous. It's fantasy and magic, but it's happening to adults; the situations are serious, and the stakes grow to be enormous. In the end it's absolutely gripping.

In case it's not at the library.

101 Two Minute Pop Songs, pt. 1

Two-minute pop songs are a little like pistachio nuts—hard to stop at one. So here's 34 with more to come.

Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick (45 RPM)" (1963) Just plain fine no matter what the season. (1:59)
Beach Boys, "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" (1964) (2:01)
Beatles, "Do You Want to Know a Secret" (1963) (1:59)
Beatles, "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You" (1964) Probably the best song here. (1:59)
Beatles, "It's Only Love" (1965) From Help! but belongs on Rubber Soul, I swear. (1:59)
Beatles, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967) (2:02)
Big Four, "Outta Tune" (1960) If they are, I can't hear it, but then I've never had the ear anyway. Wait a minute, I think I did hear some bad notes? Nah... (2:02)
Billy Fury (w/ the Gamblers), "Stand By Me" (1960) Not the Ben E. King song. (2:01)
Billy Riley & His Little Green Men, "Flyin' Saucers Rock 'n' Roll" (1957) (2:02)
Blur, "Song 2" (1998) It's almost old-fashioned, in a way. (2:01)
Bob Dylan, "Suze (The Cough Song)" (1963) As featured on the main menu page for the No Direction Home DVD, albeit sans actual cough and attendant conversation and laughter. (1:59)
Bombay the Hard Way (feat. Dan The Automator and DJ Shadow), "Ganges a GoGo" (1999) (1:59)
Boss Hog, "Ski Bunny" (1995) Probably the best song here. (2:01)
Box Tops, "The Letter (Single Version)" (1967) (1:59)
Canned Heat, "Big Fat" (1969) (1:59)
Charlie Walker, "Soft Lips and Hard Liquor" (1974) (1:58)
Chipmunks, "Can't Buy Me Love" (1964) Hit that guitar, Simon boy. (1:59)
Chocolate Watchband, "Psychedelic Trip" (1967) (1:58)
Clash, "White Riot" (1977) A good one to sing along with. (2:01)
Clyde McPhatter, "Lover Please" (1962) (2:01)
Collins Kids, "Mercy" (1956) These Collins siblings, Lorrie 14 and Larry 12 at the time of this recording (as best I can tell), obviously must have had it in their genes, though I wonder what happened to them as adults. The real story, I mean. Note that it's Larry playing the guitar. (2:02)
Dave Clark Five, "Bits and Pieces" (1964) (1:59)
Dave Clark Five, "Over and Over" (1965) (2:00)
Dave Edmunds, "Here Comes the Weekend" (1976) Probably the best song here. (1:59)
Dean Martin, "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow" (1959) (2:00)
Dick Dale, "The Wedge" (1962) Can this guy play a guitar or what? (2:01)
Dusty Springfield, "Bad Case of the Blues" (1969) Even something as cheesy as this. Even something as cheesy as this. (2:00)
Eddie Cochran, "Summertime Blues" (1958) Major rock 'n' roll epicenter. Almost certainly the best song here. (2:00)
Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "No Action" (1978) Say hello to the Attractions and then get out of the way of this one or it will run you over like a truck. (1:59)
Elvis Presley, "All Shook Up" (1957) I'm itchin' like a man on a fuzzy tree. My friends say I'm actin' wild as a bug. (1:59)
Elvis Presley, "Bossa Nova Baby" (1963) (2:01)
Elvis Presley, "Don't Be Cruel" (1956) (2:03)
Elvis Presley, "Introduction-Early Morning Rain" (1977) From his final performance in Indianapolis on June 26, 1977. Mostly the show is the train wreck you would expect, or maybe that's the quality of the recording from a handheld microphone in the crowd, but this is a lovely moment.  (2:02)
Elvis Presley, "Make Me Know It" (1960) (1:58)