The Year in Review

Wayne Wood

1. Warren Zevon’s The Wind This amazing record is the one Zevon made after he knew he was dying from cancer. It completes his “Mortality Trilogy,” which began with Life’ll Kill Ya in 2000 and continued in 2002 with My Ride’s Here. Highlights: “Disorder in the House,” which features a screaming Bruce Springsteen guitar solo; the title track, with gorgeous backup singing by Emmylou Harris; and the final song, “Keep Me in Your Heart,” a plea from a dying man not to be forgotten that is somehow uplifting and life-affirming, even as it brings tears to your eyes. Zevon died two weeks after The Wind’s release in August.

2. “Tell Us the Truth” concert, Nov. 14, Belcourt Theatre Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Mike Mills, Lester Chambers and the Nightwatchman (Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine) toured the country this fall, offering up music with a message. Bragg, the headliner of the tour, is an unapologetic British lefty who stands up for unions, workers’ rights, anti-media consolidation and the power of music to change minds and change the world. A bunch of causes, one great show.

3. iTunes Music Store When Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs announced that he had brought together the major record companies around the idea of simple, legal, reasonably priced downloads, the stockholders in Tower Records had to have looked a little pale. Easy to search, easy to download, easy to burn to CD or move to an iPod, the iTunes store shows, once again, that Jobs gets it: He knows how technology should work. iTunes doesn’t have everything you’d want—no Beatles or Zappa yet—but this is closer than anything has come to what the future was supposed to look like.

4. Mars approaches As the Red Planet got closer to Earth than any time in 60,000 years, the late-summer night sky became something to celebrate. An all-night viewing party at Dyer Observatory was so crowded that scores of people were turned away. Another event at the Adventure Science Center parking lot, in which a couple dozen local amateur astronomers set up telescopes for the public, allowed the curious to peer at a close-up view of the red disc with the shining white polar icecap. And even afterward, I lived the rest of the summer with the knowledge that Mars was there in the dark sky, glowing red like an electric stove eye.

5. Lost in Translation What a lovely, achingly sad, funny movie Sofia Coppola has crafted. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play perfectly opposite each other as two people set adrift in a Tokyo hotel, disjointed by jet lag, the cultural isolation of a foreign country and, most of all, the loneliness of their own hearts.

6. Bob Newhart on ER Sometimes comedians aren’t regarded as actors until they perform drama, but this is as good an excuse as any to point out that this man is a cultural treasure and an artist of the highest degree. His humor is the quiet, unassuming sort that takes as its starting point his utter bewilderment at the behavior of other people and at modern life in general. In a time brimming with comedians who confuse shock and volume with humor, Newhart shows the observation of the absurd as a necessary coping mechanism. Oh, and on ER? As a man who is suicidal because of his slipping into blindness, Newhart was terrific. He has won exactly one Emmy in his career, for a 1961 variety show. It’s time for another.

7. The war through the lens of Antoine de Saint Exupery As the rhetoric grew more bellicose and the war in Iraq grew nearer, I happened to be reading Wind, Sand and Stars, a book published in 1939 (though still in print). In it, Saint Exupery describes learning to be a pilot for Aeropostale, ferrying mail between France and its colonies in North Africa. Saint Exupery brought a Westerner’s eye to the culture of the Arabs he encountered in his travels, and in Wind, Sand and Stars, he offered a reminder that events look different from the perspective of history and the perspective of humanism than they look in the swirl of a manufactured war frenzy.

8. The publishing event of the year Watching the Wheels: Cheap Irony, Righteous Indignation and Semi Enlightened Opinion, by Wayne Wood. I totally recommend this book.

Diann Blakely

The year in books:

1. George Plimpton, 1927-2003 “Noblesse oblige” sounds antiquated and sociopolitically tacky until someone like Plimpton dies. With Peter Matthiessen and Harry Humes, he founded The Paris Review and provided funding and office space—in his own apartment—for the magazine throughout his life. Never one to risk looking foolish, he was most recently featured in magazine ads wearing sandwich boards to tout the 50th-anniversary issue, which had just been put to bed when he died. Plimpton’s goofy grace hid his ferocious, energetic seriousness about literature, and it’s a further mark of his generosity and humility that he didn’t identify the Review as his sole property and that he set up a foundation shortly before his death to insure its continued life.