Not Fade Away: Yo La Tengo

According to Wikipedia, Yo La Tengo formed in 1984, and has been recording albums under that moniker with the same personnel since 1992.  Nearly all of their albums have been critical hits, but for some reason the band has never  penetrated my consciousness with any regularity.  The first album of theirs that I bought was 1990's "Fakebook," an acoustic outing that turned out to be almost entirely different than the rest of their catalog.  I've bought one or two others, including their anthology, but for the most part they've been a band that I respected more than actively enjoyed.

I'm not even sure what possessed me to buy "Fade," their new album released in January.  It may have been some enthusiastic tweets from Michele Catalano, or the A- that Christgau awarded the album on his Expert Witness blog.  But whatever the reason, I'm glad that I did because "Fade" is clearly the record to beat for 2013 album of the year, a consistently strong work that strikes a perfect tone from its very first chords and maintains that tone throughout, when the album fades out behind a "joyful cacophony" of guitar, bass, drums, strings, and horns.

It's a very modest album, reminiscent of Jack White's "Blunderbuss" in that guitarist Ira Kaplan never feels the need to show off his chops in a "listen at me, I'm an underappreciated guitar genius!" kind of way.  The music is beautiful, an atmospheric mix that bands like Grizzly Bear (and even, forgive me, Bon Iver) could only hope to approach on their best days.  The highlights for me are "Ohm," the album's loudest tune that evokes a bit of Arcade Fire, "I'll Be Around" (not the Spinners classic hit, although there is a great video on YouTube of the band covering that song), "Before We Run," the closing song, and most of all "The Point of It," which simply is a gorgeous song.

If there is a better album released this year, that would be a great thing, because the bar set by "Fade" is so high that it would need to be really good.

Sophie

As annoying as pets can be - especially cats who insist on being fed and watered at the first hints of sunrise - it's not until something unexpected happens to one that you realize what an integral part of the family they are.

We've had Sophie for 18 years now, which means that Son #1 (now 22) was 4, and Son #2 (now 18) was just a baby.  It's not likely that either one of them remembers a time when we did not have her.  She's slowed down over the years, to the point where she sometimes needs help jumping up onto the bed or the couch, and to the point where the days of doing things like jumping up on the counter are long gone.  She's had some health issues in recent months, and even though those issues didn't approach the level of life-threatening, we had begun to mentally prepare ourselves for the inevitable.

When we got home the night of the Academy Awards, she somehow slipped out the front door when we were taking the garbage out, and we didn't notice she was gone until we woke up the next morning.  By then she was long gone, or at least gone.  To say that we felt horrible was an understatement - even though she was old, this was certainly not the way we wanted to lose her, and since she rarely went outside for more than a few minutes at a time (in our backyard, usually to nosh on a little grass), our confidence in her ability to survive in the big bad outdoors was not very high.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending.  After 9 days of putting up signs, visiting vets, walking, running and driving all over the neighborhood, she was found near our local supermarket, and dropped off at the local vet, where Debra was able to pick her up.  I was on a work trip out of town, and was frankly amazed at the outcome - it just didn't seem possible after all that time that we'd see her again.

So now she is back, a little lighter and a little more tired than normal (although with a cat, can you really tell?).  The picture above was taken on Saturday morning, in her favorite place - a place where she is spending a lot of time right now.  We know that she won't last forever, but we're glad to have her back home where she can go back to being her old, annoying normal self.  In other words, part of the family.

Oscars!

My mom has hosted an Academy Awards party nearly every year since 1968, and during that 45-year period, I doubt that I've missed more than three or four of them.  I still miss the days when the Oscar telecast was in late March or early April - I always connected the show with the start of spring, and as a harbinger of warmer weather.  Having said that, there's also something to be said for getting the awards season out of the way before March Madness begins.

We always have a contest, and we always require every participant to make a selection in every category - regardless of how many of the nominated movies they've seen that year.

This year I saw more of the nominees than any other year in recent memory, thanks in large part to a son (#2) who was determined that we hit the major contenders during his holiday break from college.  Last week we (wife and I) saw "Life of Pi," completing our Oscar cycle for 2012-13.  In my book, this was an excellent year, and there are no sore spots for me in the list of major nominees.  And this was a very interesting year in the realm of Oscar buzz, and let's just say that it's a good thing I didn't forge my predictions in stone when the nominations were first announced in early January.  So, without further ado...

Best Picture

Amour
Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty

I saw all of these except "Amour," and liked them all, but some much more than others.  There's little doubt in my mind that the best movie on this list is "Zero Dark Thirty," but given the snub of Director Kathryn Bigelow and the (ridiculous, in my view) controversy over the movie's depiction of torture, zero would also seem to be the best word to describe its chances of winning.  When the nominees were announced, I would have chosen "Lincoln," but that was before the momentum shifted to "Argo," despite (and in this case, perhaps because of) the snub of Ben Affleck in the Best Director category.  Plus, "Argo" and Affleck have won everything in sight since the Golden Globes.  And Affleck's story, going from ridiculed has-been actor to universally admired director, is hard to resist.  There's no reason to think that the "Argo" trend will change here.

And the winner is:  Argo

Best Director

Michael Haneke, Amour
Benh Zeitlen,  Beasts of the Southern Wild
Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

Thanks to the two most prominent snubs in recent memory, this is a really interesting category.  Again, when the nominations first came out, I was prepared to vote for a "Lincoln" sweep, but in its own inimitable way, the Academy seems to have decided that it is the film that needs to be punished for the snub of Ben Affleck.  It doesn't really make any sense, but that's what seems to be happening.  So while Spielberg could win, and in my book he would be a worthy winner, I don't think he will - and there will almost certainly be at least three cameras pointed directly at him to capture his reaction.

And the winner is:  Ang Lee

Best Actor

Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
Denzel Washington, Flight

I haven't seen "Flight" or "The Master," but I don't think that matters one bit.  Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as our 16th President is truly extraordinary, one that will be remembered for as long as people are going to the movies.  No contest here.

And the winner is: Daniel Day-Lewis

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
Quenzhenane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild
Naomi Watts, The Impossible

Although an upset is possible - the Academy has done stranger things than to vote for Riva - the deserved favorite here is Jennifer Lawrence, who in a very short time has established herself as one of the great actors of our generation.  She was great in the sometimes silly "Hunger Games," and even better in the harrowing "Winter's Bone."  But this is her best role yet, and as good as Bradley Cooper was in "Silver Linings Playbook" (and he was surprisingly good), when the two were together onscreen, there was little doubt about which of them had the greater presence and charisma.

And the winner is: Jennifer Lawrence

Best Supporting Actor

Alan Arkin, Argo
Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

You just never know with these supporting categories.  I could easily see any of these actors winning - they're all pantheon level actors, and they've all won one before.  Arkin was funny in his role, but I kinda wish they've gone with Leonardo DiCaprio for his startling turn as an evil plantation owner in "Django Unchained."  This one is anyone's ballgame.

And the winner is: Tommy Lee Jones

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams, The Master
Sally Field, Lincoln
Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook

On the other hand, this is probably the easiest pick of the night.  Anne Hathaway is as big a lock as there can be, although her big scene left me strangely unmoved.  In fact, I think she was better in, and should have been nominated for, "The Dark Knight Rises."

And the winner is: Anne Hathaway

My other picks:

Original Screenplay: Amour
Adapted Screenplay: Lincoln
Foreign Language Film: Amour
Cinematography: Life of Pi
Documentary Feature: Searching for Sugar Man
Documentary Short: Open Heart
Animated Feature: Wreck-It Ralph
Animated Short: Head Over Heels
Live Action Short: Curfew
Editing: Argo
Production Design: Anna Karenina
Costume Design: Anna Karenina
Makeup: The Hobbit
Score: Life of Pi
Song: "Skyfall"
Sound Editing: Life of Pi
Sound Mixing: Les Miserables
Visual Effects: Life of Pi

Have fun!

Top 50 Albums of All Time, #24 - Talking Heads, 1977-80

OK, so I'm cheating with this one.  But it's my list, right? 

After several weeks of trying to nitpick the differences between the Talking Heads' first four albums, I've reached the conclusion that to take any one of them out of the context of what the band accomplished in the late 1970s would be a mistake.  Each one of the albums has its own distinct identity, but together they form a cohesive whole, and paint a picture of a band that over the course of a four-year period, figured out exactly what it wanted to do, and achieved it with spectacular results.

Listening to the debut album, Talking Heads '77, is what it feels like to read the first book by a great novelist.  All the pieces are there - the talent, the musicianship, the songwriting - all that it lacks is a sympathetic editor who can pull all of those pieces together and help the artist realize their potential and their vision.

With More Songs About Buildings and Food, the band found that editor in producer Brian Eno. As Robert Christgau wrote at the time, Eno and the Heads were the ideal producer-artist collaboration, and you can hear his contributions in the record's every groove.  If anything was lacking on the debut, it was a sense of sound - and love him or hate him, one thing that Brian Eno can do very well is create a distinctive sound.  Where the music on the debut sounded a little flat, on the sophomore effort it is full and distinctive.

On Fear of Music, David Byrne the songwriter and the band as musicians went in a completely different direction, but one that was no less successful.  Even more than "Psycho Killer," the songs on Fear of Music were insular, jittery and sometimes even a little scary (just listen to "Animals" and "Drugs," next time you have a chance).  At the time it came out, I remember telling a classmate that it should have been called "Dance Music for Neurotics."  Christgau didn't like it quite as much, but Lester Bangs loved it even more - which probably tells you everything you need to know.

And even with all that - three great albums, all critically acclaimed, and even a radio hit with a definitive cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" - little the band had done before (with the possible exception of "I Zimbra" on Fear of Music) was sufficient to prepare one for the epic soundscapes of Remain in Light.  I freely admit that I didn't get it at first, giving it a listen and wondering what the hell had happened - yes, I could hear David Byrne's voice in there, but this was so far outside the "Talking Heads mold" that it was a little off-putting (and besides, "The River" came out on the very same day, and it was such a rich feast that there was little time left for anything else).

It was only when I saw the Heads in concert - the first tour with the "expanding band" concept that would become legendary a few years later with the release of "Stop Making Sense" - that everything began to click.  What seemed expansive just two years earlier now seemed downright tame, as the band and Eno took the music well beyond the boundaries of punk or new wave, or whatever you wanted to call it, and created something that, to these ears, was unique.

The band would go on, without Eno, to record two more excellent albums, but nothing would ever quite match the excitement and the innovation of the first four.  But even if their career had ended in 1980, their election to the Hall of Fame would have been secure. 

Top 50 Albums of all Time, #25 - "American IV: The Man Comes Around," Johnny Cash

And so we finally break the Top 25, and from here on out every selection will be an existential crisis, as I argue with myself on whether I have this or that album rated too low, too high, or whatever.  But from this point on, we're talking degrees of magnificence.  There really isn't much to choose between these records, and depending upon the day or my mood, I might rank them differently (with the exception of those at the very top).

"What gave me the idea I could and should produce Johnny Cash?"  In his house in the Hollywood Hills, sun squeezing through the stained glass windows, Rick Rubin is sitting cross-legged and shoeless on a sofa almost the size of Johnny's favorite room.  One black dog lolls on his back, next to him.  "There's no good answer to that; it just felt like the right thing to do.  I'd been thinking about who was really great but not making really great records; what great artists are not in a great place right now.  And Johnny was the first and the greatest that came to mind.  A unique character, kind of his own force of nature.  Someone who doesn't fit into any guidelines - whatever he does it's always, well, Johnny Cash - and who didn't seem inspired to be doing his best work right now." - liner notes, Cash Unearthed, by Sylvie Simmons

"The Man Comes Around" was the fourth Johnny Cash album produced by Rick Rubin, and the last released before Cash's death in September 2003.  That May, Cash had lost his dear and beloved wife June Carter Cash, and it's not much a stretch to imagine that as he and Rubin were recording the album in 2001 and 2002, that death was not far from his mind.  The album is a valediction - Cash confronting his own mortality through a series of songs steeped in death and pain ("Hurt," "I Hung My Head," "Sam Hall," "Streets of Laredo"), sending his eternal love to June ("First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"), and wondering aloud what might await on the other side ("The Man Comes Around," "We'll Meet Again"). 

"It was hard work.  I spent a lot of time on that song, "The Man Comes Around" - weeks and weeks writing and working the lyrics around to the way they are.  I was trying for something special.  It went through all sorts of changes.  I'd written it as a poem - I haven't written many poems before, but that's how it came out - based loosely on the Book of Revelation in the Bible, and I would go from one interpretation to another on this very complicated interpretation - or to me it's very complicated - until I finally found some lyrics that worked.  I probably have 40 or 50 verses that I wrote that I didn't use."  - Johnny Cash, liner notes, Cash Unearthed

There is an early version of "The Man Who Comes Around" on "Unearthed," and it is instructive to listen to the two versions back-to-back.  The first is primarily Cash on acoustic guitar with what I would call a pretty standard country music backing.  The song is undeniable, but on that version there is a clear disconnect between the power of the lyrics and the music, which doesn't rise to the occasion.  And that is where Rubin came in - because the structure of the song on "American IV" is part of what makes the song so frightening.  There's the spoken intro, coming in as if from another world, and then the unmistakable lead-in to the song, sung in almost staccato fashion:

There's a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There will be a golden ladder reaching down
When the man comes around

Clearly, not everyone will get to use that golden ladder.   This is a truly frightening song, real end-of-the-world stuff - and likely indicative of the things that were running through Cash's mind at the time.

"Usually when I send Johnny songs it's with no real pitch, just "Listen to them and see what ones you like."  But I do remember saying when I sent him Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," "I think this particular song is  really special one.  I feel like the words have a lot of power and with you singing them it's really going to take on a whole new light." - Rick Rubin, liner notes, Cash Unearthed

I've told this story before, but it bears repeating.  The first time I heard "Hurt," I was doing something that I've done dozens of times in my life - spending my lunch hour wandering around The Beat, the great downtown Sacramento record store that is one of the few remaining bastions of independence in the industry.  Like they often do, they had a number of albums on the CD player on shuffle, so the songs weren't coming up in any particular order.  The first "American IV" song I heard that day was "Tear Stained Letter," and I remember thinking "wow, that really sounds awesome."  A few other songs went by, and then all of sudden there was "Hurt."  And I stood there in front of the speaker, goose bumps running up and down my entire body, totally transfixed by what I was hearing.

If the album consisted of just those two songs, that would probably be enough.  But in addition to the great songs already mentioned above, Cash turns in great performances of several classic standards, including "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "In My Life," "Desperado," "Danny Boy," and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," as well as his own take on "Personal Jesus" and a new version of his old song "Give My Love to Rose."

It's a great album, and a fitting testament to a great, great artist.

American IV: The Man Comes Around
Produced by Rick Rubin

The Man Comes Around/Hurt/Give My Love to Rose/Bridge Over Troubled Water/I Hung My Head/First Time Ever I Saw Your Face/Personal Jesus/In My Life/Sam Hall/Danny Boy/Desperado/I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry/Tear Stained Letter/Streets of Laredo/We'll Meet Again

Very Useful

I posted this on my Facebook page, but thought it was worth including here as well.

Still waiting to add the first person to the book.  Although the early contenders are:

- the advertising agency representative responsible for Sunday's GoDaddy.com ad; and

- whoever programmed the traffic lights on 9th Street in downtown Sacramento to ensure that cars would be required to stop at every single intersection for 9 blocks.

Second Half

5:29 - let's see if we can change the karma by starting a new post.

Nice job by Beyonce...nice Jeep commercial with Oprah.

5:31 - Apparently not...time to eat!

6:07 - Well, that was fun.

6:25 - Don't count us out yet.  Need some breaks on defense and we just might be able to get back into this one.

7:00 - Holy crap.  That was big to hold the Ravens to a FG right there.  Lot of game to play.

7:06 - TORTURE

7:22 - Setting up for quite a finish.  If Kaepernick can pull this off, it may be time for Joe and Steve to make room on the legends shelf.

7:46 - Well, fudge.

The Game

We'll see how this goes...it's been a long time since I did a live blog.

3:13 p.m.  Lots of talk during what little of the pregame festivities I watched about David Akers.  I'd just as soon not have the game come down to an Akers kick.

Beyonce wears makeup?  What's next...lip-syncing the National Anthem?

Yep, it's the Super Bowl all right - there's CBS' first commercial for The Masters...which as you may have heard, is a tradition unlike any other.

3:24 p.m.   Alicia Keys nearly breaks the 2:30 barrier!

3:36 p.m.  It definitely sounds like there are more Baltimore fans at the game than 49ers fans.

I don't dislike Jim Nantz, but of the top NFL play-by-play guys, he's my least favorite.  There's something about his work - modulated and steady - that seems a little more suited to golf than it is to football.  Al Michaels, Joe Buck and even Mike Tirico all do a better job of conveying the intensity of the moment.

3:40 p.m.  Touchdown Ravens, and the Niners have already been hurt by two key penalties.  Dear God, please don't tell me we're in for a replay of the Falcons game.

3:45 p.m.  Go.Daddy.com, I really did not want to see that.

3:54 p.m. Nice answer, although a touchdown would have been nice.  Even better?  Ray Lewis looked old and slow on a couple of those plays.

...and Amy Poehler takes the early lead in the commercial sweepstakes.

4:05 - Good defensive series.  Nice to see us breaking through the sack barrier.  Alas, this one looks like it will be going down to the last quarter.

4:13 - Turnovers will kill you every time.  That was a big one, because we had all the momentum in the world on that drive.  Let's see if the defense can tamp things down.

We're pretty far into the game, and haven't really seen a marquee commercial yet.

4:21 - And with that, we are officially into danger-territory.

4:28 - And with that, we are moving into full blown crisis mode.  And let me be the first (I hope) to coin the phrase "Har-Brawl."

4:36 - Thank you John Harbaugh!

4:48 - Well, that was an absolute disaster.  I don't need to look it up to know that no one's ever come back from a deficit this big.

4:58 - Well, 3 is better than nothing.  We got 'em right where we want 'em!

Check out the second half here.

The Prediction

Realistically, I know that this game could go either way...but there's no way I'm going to pick against the 49ers.  The Ray Lewis saga is wearisome, and I'm not certain it's written anywhere that it is his divine right to win his final game.

It will be a close, hard fought game, with the 49ers prevailing in the end, by a score of 27-17.

Remember, you read it here first.

American Top 40 Flashback: Badfinger

It might be going a bit too far to call Badfinger a "legendary band," but it's not every band that gets noticed by The Beatles, records a hit penned by Paul McCartney, and goes on to become a staple of AM radio for a few years before getting caught up in the messy dissolution of Apple and gradually fading away.  Even though the band continued to work until the early 1980s, the story had really ended a long time before that, and unfortunately in tragedy with the suicide of Pete Ham.

"Day After Day" is my favorite song of theirs, mostly because it still evokes memories of one of my favorite years in school, 6th grade.  For years after that, I would run into our teacher - Mr. Zarzana (we called ourselves "Zarzana's Zombies") - and he confirmed that it was a special class for him as well, because it was the last year he was a classroom teacher before moving up into the administrative ranks.  There are a couple of people from that class who are my Facebook friends today, and even though I haven't seen most of them in years, I'm pretty sure I could go through our class photo and remember every name, and something about every kid in that class.

"Day After Day," Badfinger, at the top of the charts in January and February of 1972.

Class of '78: "My Aim Is True," Elvis Costello

Take a close look at that cover photo - does that look like the face of a man who, more than 30 years later, would host the likes of Tony Bennett and President Bill Clinton on a television program where they talked about (and sang) music?

"My Aim Is True" is rightly considered to be one of the greatest debut albums in the history of rock and roll.  It's as if this version of Elvis left the musical womb fully formed, ready and raring to go.  And even though The Divine Mr. C would up the ante less than a year later with the remarkable "This Year's Model," an album featuring a tougher sound provided by his own band (The Attractions; on the debut, the featured band was a Bay Area group called Clover), "My Aim Is True" is a great album in its own right.

Like many other albums of that era, I first learned about "My Aim Is True" from reading a Greil Marcus review in Rolling Stone.  I don't think I have a copy of the review in my collection, but I remember it being a "dual review," of both Costello's record and the new Randy Newman album, "Little Criminals."  Marcus saw similarities between the two, although he found the Newman record disappointing, and the Costello exciting, even groundbreaking.  Looking back more than 35 years later, you can see why Marcus was tempted to make the comparison, although Elvis' early records would eventually stray far from Newman territory.

For the most part, it is the music on an album that first grabs me, as opposed to the lyrics.  But Costello is an amazing lyricist, and it was hard not to pay immediate attention to gems like these:

"Welcome to the working week, Oh I know it don't thrill you, I hope it don't kill you..."
- "Welcome to the Working Week"

"Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say..."
- "Alison"

"Oh, I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused."
- "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes"

"Well I remember when the lights went out and I was trying to make it look like it was never in doubt/She thought that I knew, and I thought that she knew, so both of us were willing but we didn't know how to to do it."
- "Mystery Dance"

"Though it nearly took a miracle to get you to stay, it only took my little fingers to blow you away."
- "Watching the Detectives"

Along with a handful of other artists, Elvis Costello helped to usher in an era of music that, no matter what you thought about it at the time, definitely gave the old rock 'n roll verities (as Robert Christgau would call them) a shot in the arm.   Listening to the album today, it evokes that time, but at the same time feels timeless - if it came out today, it would be hailed as a great work, which it is.

Oh Well...

...so much for all of those posts I was going to write last week.  I did a lot of writing last week, it's just that none of it fell into the categories that would normally end up here.  But if you're really interested in the 1200-word piece I wrote on Thursday about capital appreciation bonds, just let me know.

But as long as I'm here, why not jump in for a couple of quick hits.

- "Hansel and Gretel?"  He's a great actor, but Jeremy Renner seems to be getting very close to Nicolas Cage territory with his choices.  Doing a Mission Impossible and an Avengers movie is one thing, but this new one just looks horrible.  On the other hand, I haven't seen it so there could be some point in the future where I am forced to eat those words.

- I've written about the moaning in women's tennis on many previous occasions, but the Sharapova/Azarenka double bill the other night was just excruciating.  I finally had to stop watching the Azarenka match.  Just ridiculous.

- On the other hand, the Australian Open is always one of my favorite sporting events of the year.  It's winter, it's dark, it's cold and/or raining, you're struggling to pull yourself out of the post-holiday season blues, and there's nothing quite like watching some great tennis from a venue where it's hovering around 100 degrees and everybody present is having a grand old time.

- And how about the current situation in the men's side of the bracket?  I can't think of a time when we've had a four-way rivalry like the one we've got right now.  And even though Nadal didn't make the trip this time, it would be foolish to write him off until we have further evidence that he deserves to be written off.  In the past, during my lifetime, we've had Connors/Borg, McEnroe/Borg, Sampras/Agassi, and a few others.  Every now and then a third would slip into the mix, but what we have right now - a point where in any given tournament, all things (especially health) equal, you could go with Djokovic, Federer, Murray or Nadal and no one will raise their eyebrows.  Fun, and (I think) unprecedented.

- So Sports Illustrated has picked the Ravens to win the Super Bowl, 27-23.  That's fine - and things could turn out that way.  But I'm counting on the boys by the bay to ruin Ray Lewis' little party, and I'll be offering my prediction sometime before kickoff next Sunday.  I promise.

"Zero Dark Thirty"

I suppose it's impossible to write about "Zero Dark Thirty" without acknowledging the politics that have dominated the discussion about the movie, so I might as well get that out of the way first.

Of course, there's the question of torture.  Does the movie glorify torture?  Does the movie tell a false story with respect to how it links torture (and the information gleaned from it) with finding Osama bin Laden? 

Then there's the question of Hollywood politics.  Was Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar snub due to the perception of Hollywood that she made her movie with the full cooperation of the C.I.A. and/or some other arm of the U.S. government? 

The whole thing strikes me as a little ridiculous, so here are a few personal observations.

1. I was expecting the torture scenes to be much worse than they turned out to be.  More than one of the scenes in "Django Unchained" made me squirm in my seat much worse than anything in "Zero Dark Thirty."  And the line between torture and the successful Bin Laden operation is somewhere between tenuous and indirect.  Information is obtained, but if I followed the narrative correctly, it was not always correct, and certainly not always helpful.  So I'm not sure how that translates into a glorification of torture.

2. One never knows what evil lurks in the minds of Oscar voters, but it is without question a travesty that Bigelow did not receive an Oscar nomination for her direction.  You can reasonably criticize the film's character development and even screenplay, but you simply can't criticize the direction, which is masterful.

And I'm no apologist for any of the foreign policy mistakes the U.S. has made during my lifetime, and I've read "Endless Enemies" so I know that many of the situations in which we've found ourselves on the world front resulted almost entirely from previous mistakes or errors in judgment that we made.   However, none of that stopped me from "rooting" for our side during the movie.

So with all that out of the way, I'll just come right out and say that "Zero Dark Thirty" is a magnificent movie, one that will likely one day come to be regarded as a masterpiece.  It's no small trick to construct a movie around an already known outcome and maintain the tension throughout, but Bigelow manages it while barely breaking a sweat.  Part of the reason for this is that the viewer knows how much is at stake, so even though the movie is "about" the Bin Laden operation, it always feel as if it's focused on something much bigger - nothing less than a war about a way of life.

Jessica Chastain was the perfect choice to play Maya, the intrepid CIA analyst who slowly but surely - through mind-numbing hours of data collections, and soul-numbing moments of "enhanced interrogation" - puts together the information she needs to pinpoint the location of Bin Laden.  Slight in physical appearance, she nonetheless is a force to be reckoned with - and it's no small matter that it is her larger and tougher colleague who ends up back in the States, weary of it all.  In a way, she and her colleagues are almost like the flight crew technicians in "Apollo 13" - not glamorous, but determined and with talents that from the outside are easy for some to miss.

But the entire cast is great - Kyle Chandler as the world weary station chief,  Mark Strong as the middle/upper level manager overseeing the operation against Bin Laden, Jennifer Ehle as Maya's tough-as-nails colleague and friend, Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt (!) as the badass leaders of the Navy Seal team that conducts the operation, even James Gandolfini as "the Director" - and all of them sprinkle their performances with a level of urgency that suits perfectly the material that screenwriter Mark Boal has given them to work with.

And a special shout-out to the movie's final 45 minutes -which depicts the actual operation itself.  This is film-making of the highest order, and when we saw it, the theater was so quiet that you could hear your own heart beating (well, at least I could).  Those scenes reach a level of intensity that have rarely been matched, but they would mean less if the almost 2 hours that preceded them hadn't set the stage so effectively.

Great, great stuff.

#26-50 of the Top 50 Albums of All Time

We're halfway through, so a recap seems to be in order.

You can find all of the individual reviews here.

26.  Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan
27.  Late for the Sky, Jackson Browne
28.  Rubber Soul, The Beatles
29. Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Frank Sinatra
30.  Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney
31.  Kiko, Los Lobos
32. Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young & Crazy Horse
33.  Horses, Patti Smith
34.  The Joshua Tree, U2
35.  Rumours, Fleetwood Mac
36.  Peter Gabriel (1980)
37.  August and Everything After, Counting Crows
38.  Tie: Siren and Avalon, Roxy Music
39.  Rocket to Russia, The Ramones
40.  Making Movies, Dire Straits
41.  Black Cadillac, Rosanne Cash
42.  Graceland, Paul Simon
43.  Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams
44.  Life'll Kill Ya, Warren Zevon
45.  Decoration Day, Drive-By Truckers
46.  Actually, Pet Shop Boys
47.  Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Elton John
48.  Los Angeles, X
49.  Madonna
50.  Some Girls, The Rolling Stones

That's not a bad list, if I do say so myself.

Busy

Well, I'm not sure where that week went.

Still in my first year back in the Capitol scene, I had forgotten how busy January could be. 

Some posts on their way:

- Might do a little live-blogging during the 49ers game, depending on how things go.

- Review of "Zero Dark Thirty," an amazing movie.

- A few words about the Pazz & Jop poll that came out a few days ago.

- Looking back at some old Pazz & Jop polls from the lens of the albums I own.

Top 50 Albums All Time, #26 - "Pretzel Logic," Steely Dan

For a while now, I've gone back and forth on the question of whether to select one Steely Dan album in this spot, or make it a three-, four- or even five-way tie.  Their albums in the 1970s were that good, and with the exception of "The Royal Scam" (parts of which I like, but which always struck me as too cold and uninviting for its own good), I could make an argument for all of their 70s album output:

Can't Buy A Thrill - a brilliant debut without a single weak song, and two hit singles to boot - both of which you still hear on the radio today.

Countdown to Ecstasy - the first hint that this band was perhaps a little bit different than your run-of-the-mill long-haired 70s rock band.  The songs were longer, making AM radio play next to impossible, and the lyrics...sometimes they were straight-forward, and sometimes they were pretty damn inscrutable.

Katy Lied - the first of their albums where they began to embrace the fact that they really weren't a band anymore, by featuring photos of a handful of the myriad session players who contributed to the work.

Aja - the transformation was complete, "Steely Dan" was now, as it would be to this day, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen and whomever they selected to accompany them on what some would denigrate as nothing more than MOR jazz.  Sure, the songs were smooth, one might even argue mellow, but to these ears it was a logical extension of what came before, and given the time I might even try to tie Steely Dan's evolution to what was happening around them during that decade.

The internal debate within my mind ended right where it began - with "Pretzel Logic," a logical extension of where they had been, but one with plenty of hints of where they would be headed in the future, with one song written by Duke Ellington and another paying homage to Charlie Parker.

There is a photo of the original band - Becker, Fagen, Denny Dias, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, and Jim Hodder - on the inner sleeve, but the notes also credit 17 additional musicians, including such session luminaries as Jeff Porcaro, David Paich, Michael Omartian, Ernie Watts, and Dean Parks.  Clearly, this was Becker and Fagen's show, and they had come to the conclusion that the constraints of the traditional rock band - guitar, keyboard, bass and drums - was insufficient to achieve the musical vision that they were after.

If the collective memories of music fans were erased today and "Pretzel Logic" was released tomorrow, there's little doubt in my mind that it would fit right in to today's fractured musical landscape.  As a band, Steely Dan was always a little on the fractured side, and there's something here to please just about everyone - the magnificent hit single "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," the sly social commentary of "Barrytown," the Ellington homage "East St. Louis Toodle-oo," the inscrutable lyrics of "Pretzel Logic," and the downright weirdness of "Charlie Freak" and "Monkey in Your Soul."

Great stuff.

Pretzel Logic, Steely Dan (1974)
Produced by Gary Katz

Rikki Don't Lose That Number/Night by Night/Any Major Dude Will Tell You/Barrytown/East St. Louis Toodle-oo/Parker's Band/Through With Buzz/Pretzel Logic/With a Gun/Charlie Freak/Monkey in Your Soul