The General (1926)

USA, 107 minutes
Directors: Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton
Writers: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Al Boasberg, Charles Henry Smith, William Pittenger, Paul Girard Smith
Photography: Bert Haines, Devereaux Jennings
Editors: Buster Keaton, Sherman Kell
Cast: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack

With the exception of Charlie Chaplin I have long tended to struggle with comedies of a certain vintage, those pratfall-driven productions usually headed up by various familiar names: Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, the Keystone Kops, even the Marx Brothers all tend to be lost on me. And I'm quite sincere in my use of the word "lost"—I envy all those who get the kind of pleasure and solace out of them that I seem to find only with Chaplin. Even Woody Allen, at one point as important a filmmaker for me as anyone (hard to remember now sometimes!), has several times made his case for the Marx Brothers. But I have only barely glimpsed any of that for myself so far.

The Three Stooges, to briefly wander off on a tangent, is something of a different matter. They don't do much for me any more, but as a kid and for years into being an adult, I did find them very funny, particularly in the company of others—the sound effects, the silly ways they carried on, the fierce concentration on their various cruelties. I remember attending a ballgame once, it must have been in the '80s, where a Three Stooges clip was played between innings. I was struck, looking around, at how hard so many of the men were laughing, and at how cross so many of the women looked. There's something about the Three Stooges that really divides by gender.

Buster Keaton is often opposed to Charlie Chaplin in a kind of Beatles/Stones or Coke/Pepsi manner of systematic binary duality, and he is another one who seems lost on me for the most part, though my exposure to him even still remains fairly limited. But I will say that I have had an interesting experience with The General.

40. T. Rex, "Ballrooms of Mars" (1972)

(listen)

I know Marc Bolan almost surely qualifies as superstar to most, at least those of a certain age, but somehow I get the feeling he's been overlooked in the long decades since his death in 1977, by which point that star was certainly fading anyway. That's probably on me, coming rather late to the best of T. Rex, which to me are the matching pair of albums from the early '70s, Electric Warrior and The Slider. No one else sounds like this. They are studies in smoldering understatement, cool bravado, tempered joy, and a hedonism restrained only by unknown laws of comportment, strictly enforced, all of it burnished to a fine buff. "Ballrooms of Mars" comes from The Slider, which I like a little better—but only because it's the one I've ended up playing the most frequently—and it's a nearly perfect example of the things that Bolan could do so well. (I hasten to add that if you like this at all you shouldn't waste another minute about getting either or both of the albums. They are fine.) I particularly like how everything about it is so casually deliberate, from the studied name-dropping (Bob Dylan, Alan Freed, John Lennon) to the science-fiction setting implied in its name to the various fashion inventories to the hoary old call to "Rock!" Everything is as cool as can be even as it manages to build itself up to a colossal head of steam. By the time Bolan commands us to "Rock!" and sends the tune sprawling into nether regions of the solar system, tumbling and spinning slo-mo in a place absent all gravity—well, I really don't see how it's possible for anyone to do anything but exactly that.

41. Hole, "I Think That I Would Die" (1994)

(listen)

I have always been a sucker for a good drama, and among other things this delivers one of the great declarations of "Fuck you" in all of rock 'n' roll. This one's personal—well, they all are with Courtney Love, but you know what I mean—it rolls up all the grievances she forever nurses about feminist backlash and unfair and you wouldn't with anyone else and why me and low self-esteem and there should have been something about Olympia, Washington, and all the fans and sycophants not appreciative (read: ingratiating) enough, and football players, and John Cheever, and thick meat sandwiches with ketchup. The usual upchuck of association, sung calculatedly out of key. Mostly this is a locus for all the seething resentment she bore over the baby Bean and Child Protective Services and so-called friends who narc'ed her out and who knows what else. But that whole episode. On that level it's just about as authentic as I've ever heard her. That's, I believe, why the chant goes, "I want my baby / Where is the baby? / I want my baby / Who took my baby?" The mumbled, "It's / Not / Yours" before the great volcanic eruption. The point is it's cathartic, like the album, but with a particularly fine point, which somehow never seems to wear away. She really seems to mean it. For a few naked moments the self-centeredness is deliberately cast off—no doubt for self-serving motives, but done all the same. And there she is, with a great band at its peak churning away behind her, genuine: "There is no milk / There is no milk / There is no milk."

Best American Crime Reporting 2007

Linda Fairstein is the editor of this volume—a former Manhattan prosecutor who has gone on to writing crime fiction. I haven't read any of her novels but I do remember her appearance on "Murder by the Book," the old Court TV (now the lamentable TruTV) show, which featured crime-fiction authors as guest hosts. Canceled too soon, it was actually one of the better true-crime shows in recent years, because the cases were often so interesting. Fairstein focused her prosecutorial career on crimes of violence against women and children, but unfortunately wound up on the wrong side of things in the Central Park jogger case, winning the wrongful convictions, later overturned, of a handful of teenage African-Americans. There's a cautionary tale there. But her collection nevertheless stands up to all the others in this excellent series, many pieces coming from a global point of view with evident interest in issues related to terrorism and public safety, not surprising for a New York official. Mark Fass contributes a fascinating mystery story for "New York" magazine about a person who disappeared in New York City on September 10, 2001, and the byzantine efforts to determine her fate. The difficulties of it lend perspective to the scope of 9/11. Then there's the harrowing story by Tom Junod for "Esquire," now done up on true-crime TV, of Katrina and a pair of nursing home operators who stayed behind in the storm and attempted to do the right thing, and found themselves in a lot of trouble for their pains. There's a clinically precise and chilling account by C.J. Chivers, also for "Esquire," of the incident in September 2004 in which Chechen terrorists took control for three days of a school in Beslan, Russia. And there are the usual round-up of quotidian incidents, with their horrors and charms alike: a master thief of rare books ... grown women seduced by 14-year-olds online ... quiet roommates who turn out to be international jewel thieves ... priests who kill. The most interesting for me this time around was "The Monster of Florence," a bizarre and twisting tale of the investigation into a serial killer who operated in Italy in the '70s and '80s. The case remained open for years and incidentally almost devours professional true-crime writer Douglas Preston, author of the "Atlantic" piece that appears here, and Italian journalist Mario Spezi, with whom Preston collaborated on a private investigation and later a book about the case. At the time of this article the case was still open, but this reminds me, I still want to track down the book that came of it.

In case it's not at the library.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

At one time, along about 1975, I was pretty sure Elton John was that decade's natural heir to Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Later I thought that was pretty ridiculous. But I guess the last laugh is on me when I look up the numbers in my Billboard book: There, on the list of 100 Top Artists 1955-2009, is Elton John at #4, behind Elvis, the Beatles, and Madonna (yes), and just ahead of Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. Wikipedia pipes up, somewhat tentatively, that this iconic double-LP package "has come to be regarded as Elton John's best and most popular album," noting that it's his best-selling anyway, with some 31 million copies moved. Checking around, I see that's good enough to put it in the vicinity of the top 20 all-time bestsellers, no small feat. So when I call it my favorite I understand that puts me with the rest of the unwashed, but at least I've pretty much thought as much since the day it came out. There has always been something a little bit different about Elton John, and I don't mean just that he was the only rock star of the time pretending to be gay who actually was gay. From his various folkie-cum-country-rock-raver postures early to the glittering glamour and pure pop insouciance on display here to the range seen across his strings of hits, he's a tough one to figure out. Me, I gave in entirely with this, a big pop confection that opens with an 11-minute suite in which you don't even hear his voice until nearly the 6:00 marker—that's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding." It's followed by a valentine to Marilyn Monroe, "Candle in the Wind," so universally beloved and genuinely touching he was able to rework it in memory of Princess Diana after her death 24 years later, and a lot of people were grateful. Then the weird faux live glam of "Bennie and the Jets," a song I am still waiting to understand, but one that nevertheless continues to thrill me. Then the title song, which verily cracks it open: that's it, this is all a big fat hosanna to beauty in the face of debilitating nostalgia, knowing the moment would never be so right because, and perhaps he even knew this too on some level, the moment would always be so right, from that point forward. And on it goes: the luscious piano textures of "Grey Seal," the sassy rock 'n' roller "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," something about a made-up cowboy, "Roy Rogers," something about a made-up Depression-era gangster, "The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-1934)," and something about "I've Seen That Movie Too." My favorite song has always been "Sweet Painted Lady," even recognizing all the execrable prostitute clichés it bears. It's so goddam fucking beautiful it makes me want to cry in spite of everything, and that's how the whole album affects me, when the moment is right, and often when it isn't. We don't know how many right moments this guy has left, except we've already seen that movie too. And now it's 40 years later.

Taxi Driver (1976)

USA, 113 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Paul Schrader
Photographer: Michael Chapman
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editors: Tom Rolf, Melvin Shapiro
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle, Martin Scorsese

A good way to start an argument is to ask people what's the best picture by director Martin Scorsese. We have already seen that Raging Bull is the consensus favorite of critics, and there are cases to be made for Mean Streets, The King of Comedy, GoodFellas, and others. But it's not hard for me to see how Taxi Driver deserves to rank very high on this list. As strange and brave and unique and enthralling as it is from beginning to end, it's also one of the most influential movies from an influential period, and its reverberations continue to be felt to this day (most recent: Ryan Gosling's brilliant turn in Drive).

In fact, that image of Travis Bickle we all know so well now, the tormented loner waiting for “a real rain” to “come and wash all this scum off the streets” and who ultimately guns up and takes matters into his own hands, has recurred one way or another in film after film after film over the 35 years since its release. Matt Zoller Seitz listed some of them in a recent slideshow article for Salon: Mona Lisa, Evil Dead II, The Killer, The Fan, I Shot Andy Warhol, Fight Club, The Brave One, others. You can probably think of a few more yourself.

42. B-52's, "Rock Lobster" (1979)

(listen)

You may not know it, but this prototypical masterpiece of new wave pop music—that halcyon form which exalted the "three-minute pop song" above all else—actually goes on for nearly seven minutes in the album version, hitting every silly note and striking every silly posture it can possibly think to do. It appears, more or less, to be a song about a beach party that turns into a scene from a bad science fiction movie. "It wasn't a rock / It was a rock lobster." Aieee! The sea creatures, they want to dance too! Oh, wait, they're cute. And so on. The sheer oddity of the B-52's is so beguiling that I never noticed how weird it actually is until Fred Schneider made his attempt to accommodate the grunge moment in the '90s. The sound is quick and nimble and cartoony and almost skeletal in its function, bursting with melody and rhythm as much as the self-conscious jokiness, single-string figures on a guitar joining forces with a jerky yet loping bass, piercing, percussive organ notes, and tip-tap drumming. The boisterous interplay of vocals from Fred Schneider (who sounds like he stepped off the set of a musical, playing the small-town geek) with Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson is largely what creates the illusion that you have somehow wandered into a basement rehearsal session and/or impromptu house party. And while I am loath as ever to endorse music that must be studied, I must admit this now takes me a time or two through before I begin to fully connect, as I recall once doing instantly. It's just very, very strange music, as butt-simple as it appears to be at first. The point seems to be to dance, and that's usually what I find myself doing in short order. This is one of the best songs that I know to hear in public places—loud.

43. Sister Sledge, "Lost in Music" (1979)

(listen)

The Chic brothers, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, never strayed far from a fairly predictable set of lyrical concerns, which is one of the reasons I love them as much as I do: living well, experiencing joy, and dancing. Sometimes feeling sad. That about covers it. One subset dedicated itself narrowly to the pleasures of music itself—the 1983 "In Love With Music" by the flagship Chic is a good example. But this is the best, from Sister Sledge, one of their greatest side projects, particularly with the We Are Family album that houses it. It feels like a statement of purpose, a virtual manifesto. All the usual elements are in place: bass and funky guitar chops locked in groove, the powerful, sweet undertow, the keyboards/strings establishing a swirling, soaring context, and then the glorious harmonies and interplay of the Sledge sisters, who sound vaguely hypnotized and helpless before the power of the music in which they declare they are lost—and in which they are obviously fully engaged. It's inspiring in its single-mindedness: "We're lost in music / Feel so alive / I quit my 9 to 5." The verses get down to details, elaborating on the pleasures of performance and throwing everything away for it: "Some people ask me / What are you gonna be / Why don't you go get a job, uh-uh / All that I could say / I won't give up my music / Not me, not now, no way, no how, oh...oh..." There's even a throwaway reference to "Suspicious Minds" ("caught in a trap")—who knows what the hell it's doing there. To me it's just more evidence of the sheer abandon to music itself, the abstracted ideal, an underlining of the point simply because they can. Simply because they saw the opportunity and did.

How to Be Alone (2002)

Jonathan Franzen's immediate follow-on to his big commercial breakthrough, The Corrections, was this collection of essays. Most were published before the massive cultural event that the third novel became, and many after a literary polemic he published in 1996 that came to be known as "the 'Harper's' essay." Franzen has a deceptive knack for stirring up trouble in and around literary circles and I came to this more interested in his account of the dust-up he had with Oprah Winfrey, "Mr. Difficult," a late add to the paperback edition. On its publication, The Corrections was named as a selection of Winfrey's book club, a distinction that virtually guaranteed bestseller-level sales all on its own, but Franzen spurned the notice, concerned that it would turn off the kind of audience he had hoped the book would find—"male," as he put it. Winfrey in turn rescinded her offer to him to appear on her show. It was altogether an unpleasant episode for all concerned, even as it was easy enough, for me anyway, to see either side of it. Franzen shows in his consideration of it that he's capable of a good deal of soul-searching and honesty, admitting that he was as uncomfortable with Winfrey's status as an arbiter of middlebrow taste as anything, even as he acknowledged the far-reaching effects of her endorsement and the harm he did himself by rejecting it. (Last year, following the publication of his fourth novel, Freedom, they resolved their differences and he appeared on her show to discuss them.) Franzen is similarly lucid and straightforward throughout this collection, whether recalling the death of his father, who was suffering from Alzheimer's, or thinking through the implications of supermax prisons, or grappling with the toxic and worsening patterns of the American political climate, or trying to set the terms for literary validity in this day and age. The "Harper's" essay, published originally as "Perchance to Dream" and appearing here in revised form as "Why Bother?," swirls around the arguments for a return to and/or calculated abandonment of the fiction of social realism. In the gap between, Franzen tells us in a foreword, his views had altered somewhat: "I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don't read much Henry James," he recalls ruefully. As someone who worries about watching too much TV and not reading enough Henry James, but does very little to change that, I may be exactly the right audience for Franzen. I certainly know that I have liked nearly everything I've read by him, and this collection is probably as good a place as any to start. Well, no—The Corrections is probably the better place to start.

In case it's not at the library.

Houses of the Holy (1973)

By the end of the '70s, under the sway of punk-rock and poor old beleaguered new wave pop music, I had come to loathe two bands above all others: the Eagles and Led Zeppelin. My distaste for Led Zeppelin had started in the aftermath of IV, which, paradoxically, perhaps I "loved too much" in its immediate moment. After the number of times I heard "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio began to approach approximately five figures the bloat and the exhaustion were unmistakable. And though I would later make a fetish of "Kashmir" for the most part I was done with them, their appeal for me on a long slow slide that would not bottom out until some point in the '80s. Thus I did not make the effort to acquaint myself with this until about 15 years after the fact, wondering at myself for even buying it at all the day I left the used record store with a copy. But lo and behold it struck like a lost treasure, full of pleasures great and small, and turned out to be one of the better purchases I made that day. I listened to it frequently for months. Listening again, I think a good deal of that was making my peace with a band I had loved, bitterly rejected for reasons good and bad, and come to rediscover. It sounds patchier to me now than I remember, and "The Crunge" very nearly torpedoes it. A kind of tribute to James Brown that can as well be heard as misplaced mockery, needless to say it's not in possession of even a fraction of Brown's funk power, no surprise from the anti-dance fancy-time-signatures Led Zeppelin, which raises questions about the decision to do it at all. A good deal of the bombast, the risk for which was ever the downside to their winning power equation, is replaced more often here by a decidedly softer side, gentle exercises in things that might almost be taken as ballads, except the power dynamics intrude on them, achieving a welcome balance, especially as the album opens and takes off: "The Song Remains the Same," "The Rain Song," and "Over the Hills and Far Away" are fine additions to their classic catalog. The second vinyl side loses its way some, though I think "Dancing Days" goes with their best, and I don't have the complaints about "D'yer Mak'er" that certain factions among the faithful do. "No Quarter" and "The Ocean" now suggest to me much of what was to come as the band left Atlantic and moved on to their own label: largely unfocused exercises with all too fleeting moments of clarion brilliance. I don't hate them any longer the way I did in 1979, but I haven't forgotten how I came to that position in the first place either.