The Ten Most Pristinely, Scientifically Perfect Pop Songs of All Time

                                                                01. The Beatles, "In My Life"

02. Joy Division, "Love Will Tear Us Apart"

03. Otis Redding, "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay"

04. The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"

05. Madonna, "Like a Prayer"

06. Prince, "When Doves Cry"

07. James Brown, "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World" 

08. The Smiths, "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" 

09. The Notorious B.I.G., "Juicy" 

10. Bruce Springsteen, "I'm on Fire" & The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows" [tie]

Tristes Tropiques 

                             Some great films can be properly appreciated and enjoyed viewed through tired eyes as the third or fourth film of a long, over-stimulating festival day. Others cannot. In my experience of last year's VIFF there was no (potentially great) film that fell more clearly into that latter category than Alberta Serra's languorous tropical anti-epic Pacifiction. I knew that I was missing something, perhaps quite a lot. I knew I needed to revisit it. And I knew also that it was one of the more visually spectacular movies I'd ever seen, and so I crossed my fingers that I'd have another opportunity to watch it on the big screen. 

Now having done so (thanks, Cinematheque!), my strong suspicion is confirmed: this a singularly awesome (in every possible sense) movie, and its strange brew of political, cultural, and sexual ideas, suggestions, motifs, allusions, analogies, enigmas etc. etc. were much more resonant and interesting to think along with as a day's main event rather than its late encore. (For lack of a better description, think, maybe, Beau Travail meets The Thin Red Line meets The Conversation!) 

I still can't say that I totally understand all, or even necessarily most, of it, and I don't expect to after viewings three, four, or five. Yet its dreamlike, appropriately oceanic rhythms are so immersive and seductive –– even hallucinatory nearing the film's stunning climax –– that gradually abandoning any logical, prosaic explanation for what exactly is going on is part of Pacifiction's hypnotic affect. 

I can't shake it, don't want to, and – once again – can't wait to see it again. It is one of the few truly great films of this young decade so far. 

 Time Fades Away

                                                        

I graduated from high school twenty (!) years ago, and one of the things I most associate with that period of time is Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the terrific making-of documentary I am Trying to Break Your Heart, and catching the band live on a hot day in a college parking lot (and chatting a bit with Jeff Tweedy after that show!). They felt at the moment like, maybe, possibly, the best band in the world. Or at least the American Radiohead. 

YHF was recorded before 9/11, then became stuck in record-label limbo before being released 'officially,' i.e., as an ownable physical object (a distinction that remained quasi-meaningful at the time), in spring 2002. And yet, its collage of sounds and words felt eerily prescient in invoking and capturing the post-attacks zeitgeist ("tall buildings shake / voices escape singing sad, sad songs"), one of surprisingly few great and still-vital 9/11-adjacent works of art, along with, say, Spike Lee's 25th Hour, Sleater-Kinney's One Beat, and Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. 

In the years since, my enthusiasm for Wilco has waned somewhat, as none of their subsequent records (some pretty good, some 'meh') have come close to YHF. Perhaps the late Jay Bennett's notorious ego was justified after all? 

Now, though, I'm enamoured of something called (cheekily, I hope...)  "The Unified Theory of Everything Version" of YHF, accessible as 'volume' two on the five-'volume' (a tacit acknowledgment of, vinyl fetishists aside, the primarily non-physical form of musical products ca. 2022: In the Shadow of No Discs) twentieth-anniversary edition of Wilco's masterpiece. It sounds like a million bucks, especially coming through better headphones than probably existed twenty years ago; a few tracks might even be better than their official album versions. "Kamera" rocks like it does live; "Jesus, Etc." is less ghostly but no less lovely; "Poor Places" adds a piano part that unmistakably 'quotes' from George Martin's indelible "In My Life" interlude; and "I'm the Man Who Loves You" sounds even more like he means it. 

All's Well That Ends Well

No hyperbole, one of the all-time great closing scenes in cinema. 

Life Stories

 

Incidentally, I just finished both of these books –– one after pleasurably dipping in here and there for a couple weeks' worth of bus commutes and the commercial breaks and halftimes of basketball and football games, the other following three months of harrowing and engrossing late-night reading –– and am now consequently connecting some very odd dots. 

It may well be that there is nothing new under the sun. But has anyone else on earth concurrently read Rachel Bloom on neurotically delayed potty-training,  the sexual politics of musical theatre, amusement-park etiquette, and wearing Spanx to award shows together with an encyclopedically detailed 900-page biography of the author of If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved? 

If so, I desperately want to chat with that other person. 

 Top Ten Songs I Wish Rihanna Had Performed

Sub out "Where Have You Been," "Only Girl," "We Found Love," "Wild Thoughts," and (ugh!!) both Kanye-associated tracks.

An embarrassment of riches, to be sure. But beggars can be choosers. 

01. "Stay"

02. "Love on the Brain"

03. "Man Down" 

04. "Russian Roulette" 

05. "SOS"

06. "S&M"

07. "Needed Me" 

08. "Can't Remember to Forget You" 

09. "Don't Stop the Music" 

10. "Shut up and Drive"