Best of 2006

I do this every year. The point is not what was necessarily the artistic best of the year, but actually what I read or listened to or saw (and usually what actually ends up on this list in a combination of all three) that actually meant the most to me. As a result this, list has almost no criteria even though I like to think I have good taste. But everything on it is something that matters a lot to me.

Cormac Mccarthy
There’s something happening here, and it is clearly and completely terrifying. We will sacrifice a lot for each other, but all of that is not enough. Somewhere there are trees of dead babies and bones with the flesh boiled off of them. Somewhere people are in love, but it cannot be here. Parts of the world are burning, and we want to see them, we want to touch the ashes. The ashes are stark, but hell if they aren’t beautiful.
At some point in January, I went on a serious reading binge when there were many, many other things I should have been doing. At the end of this was a borrowed copy of Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which is often considered to be Mccarthy’s best novel. It is certainly the most intense, and most harrowing. I had a bizarre experience reading Blood Meridian that I rarely have with books—when I finished it about forty-eight hours after I started it, I had virtually no idea what the specifics of the book were. This feeling was weird, and intriguing. I had read his Border Trilogy before, but this novel was different. Over the year, I read this book three times, and I read four other Mccarthy novels. I read them in different places, in different mental conditions. Mccarthy books don’t teach me anything—their common thread is their violence, and that they exist in a world where you are always surprised to see a radio or a truck on a dusty road. In other words, Mccarthy doesn’t write about us and our angst or trauma. But he writes beautifully, and his books get at some kind of greater, desperate experience which has more in common with our world than we’d otherwise think. These books are essentially modern, they are psychedelic, and they are impossible to read just once.

Camera Obscura, “Let’s Get Out of This Country”
With no offense to Camera Obscura, I mean the song and not the album. I mean the song because it was on repeat this summer, the Scottish lilt and string hook splitting their way through all the heat and angst and horror of months back at home. If I had to analyze what parts of my life are based on some vague form of escapism, it would probably horrify me. But this song is so simple in its wishes: I want to be in a different place, and I want to be there with you. Though the second part of the sentiment is not something I strive to practice in my daily life, “Let’s Get Out of This Country” explains that, on all counts.

Readyville

C’mon, baby do me a favor. C’mon baby, tell me it’s too late. An El Camino is a car, to ge me where I’m going, even if it’s not where I’m supposed to be. The heart’s all cold, but the tongue’s all gin and this paperback is giving me a heart attack. Though we’ve been here for ages, we still act like little kids.

Ah, alt.country, love of my life! Twee will never supplant you, my darlingest darling, my flannel-clad, slide guitar-welding, whiskey-drinking paramour. It’s not just about half-broken windshield wipers and singing songs loudly in Chicago. It’s about spending all your money on cheap flowers and drinking until you’re honest, even when that turns out to be boring.


The Squid and The Whale, Kicking and Screaming
Technically, I saw both of these movies in 2005. But I watched them much more in 2006. Squid is saved on my computer desktop, and I watch it with alarming frequency. In contrast, Kicking was impossible to find for quite a while—it was only released on DVD at the end of the summer, and my video store lost their VHS version. Both are by Noah Baumbach, who, for some reason or another has a real ability to write things that captivate me. Kicking is the only movie I’ve found that replicates what I loved about high school movies for the liberal arts set. When Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” comes on at the end, we are left depressed, nostalgic, and meaningfully hopeful. I appreciate that. Conversely, I like movies that make me cringe, but Squid and the Whale has a real heart. Brooklyn in all its decrepit gentrification, Knopf, hate where there was love, longtime emotional scarring written really beautifully, and skin peeled off the lower lip. Trying, but not hard enough, and everyone is sad for all the right reasons. These are human failure at its loveliest. The awkwardness of adolescence, and the more upsetting awkwardness of adulthood—all unavoidable.

Voxtrot, s/t EP
Personally, I think this is a stupid band name. And Voxtrot sometimes writes about stupid things. However, their songs are filled with such vibrancy and such understanding that I forgive them for saying that we’re young and stupid and raised by wolves. We are, at points. We can shake our bodies and wreck our minds, and you are the wrecking force in me whether I like it or not, so I might as well tell you. Voxtrot came out with other records this year, but the first hit with such a charming immediacy, and I listened to it so much, and I danced to it so much, that I can’t even fathom last spring without these songs.

The Mountain Goats, “No Children”
When your heart breaks slowly, you find something to steel yourself against. Driving in Philadelphia and screaming the words, in a field in Chicago, in cars all over the country. Every place means something different, because we kept changing. The irony is this is a song about things staying the same forever. Maybe we aren’t so hopeless after all. I still hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us, but for entirely different reasons.

Charles D’Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum, Tom Waits, “Hold On”
The Dead Fish Museum was a book I pined for all spring, desperate for its newly printed pages, too poor to afford it in hardcover. “Hold On” could be about D’Ambrosio characters—the utter stillness in a scene, all the things that make sense about chance, and so beautifully articulated that it really does matter. Everything ends up hollow in both instances, but we are trying. We discover that trying is what matters.

Marat/Sade
France gave me horrible dreams the whole way through. There is something surreal about suddenly being half incommunicado with the world while in a place where you feel like you’ve already seen everything, but in your head. There is a sense of weirdness and foreboding, there is a specific flood of beauty and there is an anticipation for moving away from such weirdness. I read a lot, and I read in English because I thought it would chase away whatever was confusing me. I don’t like dreaming in other languages.
Marat/Sade was written in German, so maybe I was undermining myself a little bit. My copy broke in half on the plane home. Stiff binding, but excessive over-reading. The play is railing against nature and the nature of the self. The play is complicated and brutal, and I appreciate that. The characters are all someone else inside of someone else, and the audience is confused and horrified. A distance from beauty is good.


The Blow
Chicago streets and parks in the sunshine are an odd thing to associate with music about personal strength and personal weakness and complication and relationships, but that expanse is the best thing about the Blow. Chicago goes on forever, and everything is visible, the only barriers are what we’ve constructed. We are neurotic, but justified in being so. The city glittering at night some point later, cheap plastic sunglasses and something lovely trapped in those sounds. I think I get it now, or I think I’m getting at it. The Blow is adorable and accurate, and they make some of the most articulate pop songs I’ve heard. These songs make me believe in some commonality of experience that is not immediately apparent. I don’t know about being on the same level as anything, but this is music that is about the desire for both intimacy and inevitable betrayal. The Blow maintains a safe and logical distance from the songs while being so intensely involved in them enough to make a heart stop.

Josh Ritter, “Girl in the War”, Okkervil River, “O, Dana” & Rhett Miller, "My Valentine"
Trapped in a thunder storm, talking on a cell phone, completely drenched and horrified as much as I was eager. Shivering cold and nervous. Everything happened and I was either too far away from it or too close to do anything. Josh Ritter says, “Peter said to Paul, ‘You’ve got to rock yourself a little harder. Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire’. And us talking to God is Laurel begging Hardy for a gun.” So falling asleep with this song on repeat isn’t a bad thing, but it’s an admittance that something is horribly wrong. “O, Dana” is a Big Star cover, but it’s the same thing, in different terms. And "My Valentine" is about overcoming ambivalence towards real appreciate and real action. It starts with a Dylan Thomas reference ("Love in the asylum is a beautiful thing") and goes on to something that isn't complex or well-thought so much at genuine. Admit that you’re hurt and uncertain, admit that you’re angry, and admit that you're happy with what you've got. Telling the truth is something to strive towards, and is consistently unavoidable.