2004, 2005.

These are my top lists from the past two years. Verbatim.

2005:
1) Joan Didion. We, my friends, are all the dreamers of the golden dream. We are the victims and the murderers and the people trying to get by on love or money or hope or sex or failure. We lose ourselves, and years later we realize that we are not ourselves without the people who we love, and when we lose them we have to continue to be ourselves anyway, even without them. Sometimes we have to sit and wait for a wave to hit us. Sometimes we have to witness the awful, sometimes we have to watch Jim Morrison fuck up on the precipice of a new, shitty era, sometimes we have to watch ourselves fuck up and then we stand tall and move and wear flowers in our hair and put on our sunglasses and keep thinking and keep writing and we stare at the sky and feel that weird sense about everything being okay, in the end. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and we tell ourselves stories so that when we die, we will have threads to hold onto, things pulling us. I read six Joan Didion books this year. And I learn lessons from every sentence.

2) Bright Eyes. Because driving around downtown and screaming the most emo lyrics ever can be beautiful. Because sometimes it's good to admit that you're in trouble, as long as you do it eloquently. Because Conor is an intense little kid, and a ghost and because he recorded an alt.country record. Because this time last year I sure as hell did NOT want to marry him. In the end, I think Bright Eyes might be a phase. That kind of staggering intensity shouldn't apply to me for long. But this is my phase, and this is my shitty winter and my days of drinking whiskey and wine and feeling that everything is sometimes too difficult and sometimes too fucking easy.

3) M.I.A. The night before I graduated high school, I went to see M.I.A. I remember dancing and jumping and feeling so lovely and sweaty and I didn't care. I want to be M.I.A., or possibly sleep with her (actually, that's just a paraphrase of something I'v heard said a lot this year). Neither of those two are a very viable option, so I'll setlle for just listening to her music and trying (and failing) to sing along. It's drama, but it makes me smile.

4) Adrian C. Louis, "Colossal American Copulation". For a brief period this spring, I was good friends with really truly messed up kids who were trying to get better. The way this poem works is lovely. It's a personal history of a personal vendetta against the self. And in the end, it's not about being angry at yourself (it never is), so much as everything that you really truly can't control. And that's what fuck is about, really. It's about the control you never really had and will never get. Fuck that.

5) Twee. Ha. I'm liking my juxtaposition. I'm still pretty unable to listen to a lot of twee pop in a row. But: Stephin Merritt is sort of me, if I were a gay man. He's sarcastic and unstable and prolific and suspicious of love. And Belle & Sebastian can be lovely (and sarcastic, yay!), especially ignoring all those horn solo bits. And our days in Kansas really shouldn't have lasted, though I wake up every morning to something different, I think. But in the end, this item is really a concession. We argue about Tullycraft's punctuation all the time. I think in the end, it's a personal decision. For me: Fuck me. I'm twee?!?

6) Charles D'ambrosio. This was a year of reading things forever, even things that I loved. Orphans, his book of essays, was tiny but took me about two months to read just because I had to keep going back and reading sentence after sentence again. It was that beautiful. Essays about walls and home factories and biosquats and families. In the end, it'll all make sense. In the end. Possibly. We go to bed and say our prayers or we won't say them, and we'll sleep together or we'll sleep alone. And we'll miss "The Point", and then we'll find it in a bookstore in Chicago and feel a little better about it all, a little closer to home.

7) Dar Williams "What do you love more than love?"/ Sufjan Stevens "Chicago", "Casimir Pulaski Day". At the end of the summer, after everything was fucked up but before I realized that it would effectively stay that way forever, I would listen to these songs. They're spiritual, so it's a little weird for me. A Buddhist pop song about building new relationships with yourself, and two very Christian songs about running away from those relationships and effectively dying. These are songs about questioning your own desires and realizing that sometimes you have to give in to whatever is pulling you towards it, or pushing you away.

8) Veronica Mars. I also want to be Veronica Mars. She is so much better than I'll ever be. This show is wonderful, even when it isn't.

9) The Mountain Goats, "The Sunset Tree"/ Okkervil River (entire works. Not as entire as if Miranda was writing this though). Lit bands who write about victims and fucked up girls. They're overdramatic, but they know how to twist the knife. "So this is what the volume knob's for" and "We have seen this stuff, and we have seen enough" are the two most sincere, awfully harrowing statements I've heard this year. And yeah, I often need a little reminding (especially when it's cold out and I'm walking around Chicago, alone, feeling, well, shitty) that people are worse off emotionally than I am, and that it takes years for wounds to heal. That's a strange statement. These bands get in touch with things I'm afraid to feel, I think. They do it well.

10) Ryan Adams. Nothing makes me more comfortable than listening to Mr. Adams. For that, and much, I am entirely grateful. I could go into a bizarre psychoanalysis here (I mean, really not the healthiest guy to make you "comfortable"), but I won't.


2004:
1) The Shins "Chutes too Narrow". I remember hearing the live version of "
Gone for Food" at least forty Iimes one night in december. I didn't like this record until later that winter, when i was driving back from silk city and the windows were down and we were blasting 'Kissing the Lipless'. Since then.

2) Susan Neville "The House of Blue Lights". I read the story, 'The Increasing Distance' at Governor's School. It was just so good-- the way I want to write if I really write. Susan Neville's prose is really beautiful and poetic, but I feel it is also really subtly character focused and intense.

3) Ryan Adams "Love is Hell pts 1 and 2". This was my driving music last winter, when things were really shitty at school. Such a winter album! Lt makes me think of salt-stained gray roads and the sun hitting the steeple of Lasalle and sort of laying there, bleeding.

4) T.S. Eliot "the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I've never loved a poem as much as I loved this poem last spring, when everything felt intoxicating yet really, painfully still.

5)"Freaks and Geeks". Any show that makes me cry this much and obsessed with Deadheads is a wonderful piece of art. Sometimes too brutal to watch because it so accurately captures high school.

6) J.D. Salinger "Franny and Zooey". So many of the things that meant the most to me this year were about paralysis, and none more than this. I love the glass family, but more importantly I love the slightly off world that they inhabit-- the dressing gowns and baths and cigarettes and winter coats.

7) Deborah Eisenberg "What it was like, seeing Chris"- I wrote my best college essay about reading this story again and realizing how profoundly it has affected me the first time I read it. More importantly, I actually believed every word that I was writing.

8) Wilco "a ghost is born". I know you all think this is a shitty record. But it's a mood piece, it's a definition, and it's beautiful to listen to. Jeff Tweedy is my aesthetic. enough said.

9)the Decemberists "Red Right Ankle" and "July! July!". two songs. I know that two songs is not everything this band really means to me. but one song is everything tender and scary that I've been forcing myself away from. and the other is summer and its wonderful grossness and fervor.

10)Neutral Milk Hotel "In the aeroplane over the sea". This album has so many far flung emotional implications for me, and I get the feeling it's going to gather more in the coming year. because I listened to "King of Carrot Flowers" everyday for a month. and because I drew a picture of it in my notebook and that kept me occupied forever. Because sometimes I need something that makes me feel better, and this does.