Last December, we tried something different: Rather than run lists of our music writers’ favorite records of the past 12 months, as we’ve always done, we decided to invite various Scene contributors to weigh in about all kinds of culture: not just music, but books, art, theater, even newsworthy events. This year, we’re doing it again, with some writers noting not just highlights and favorites, but the passing of several icons and the chaotic realities of a world scarred too often by bombs, guns and fractiousness.
Jim Ridley
10. “Window Water Baby Moving,” from By Brakhage (Criterion DVD) Stan Brakhage’s death this year from cancer robbed film of one of its boldest explorers and ended a five-decade body of experimental filmmaking so protean, visionary and massive that it’s hard to find an entry point. Unless you happen upon a big-screen retrospective in some other city, start with Criterion’s staggering two-disc overview, of which this 12-minute 1959 short recording the birth of his first child is a highlight.
9. Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantic (Dirtnap Records) Last summer, a friend told me about this great Portland, Ore., band he’d seen a few months back that sounded like the long-lost children of the New York Dolls and the Buzzcocks. When I went to buy the CD at Grimey’s, someone said that just days before, three of the four members had been killed in a van wreck. The news was sad enough then. After hearing the record, it was heartbreaking.
8. McCoy Tyner, April 24 at the Belcourt The hardest-rocking show in Nashville this year, courtesy of a 65-year-old jazz pianist in an electrifying trio. Please, more shows here for rising jazz stars and legends of Tyner’s caliber.
7. Atom Egoyan, Oct. 30 at Wilson Hall, Vanderbilt Even for those who hadn’t seen Ararat, the Canadian filmmaker’s complex meditation on the still disputed Armenian genocide at Turkish hands, his talk about the representation of history and the confrontation of denial was brilliant and far-ranging. Even livelier was the incendiary post-film discussion, where unusually informed debate raged among Nashvillians of Turkish and Armenian descent. Question: Where were all the representatives of Nashville’s film community, who apparently couldn’t drive across town to meet one of the most important directors working today?
6. Stardust Drive-In opening weekend, Aug. 29, Watertown Not even a concession stand running at half-strength or a film projected upside-down could dampen the sellout crowd’s excitement as “The Star-Spangled Banner” crackled from car radios. My little girl sat watching Finding Nemo in a red plastic deck chair, clutching an Alien Glow Pop and a tub of popcorn bigger than she.
5. Olivier Assayas interview, Cinema Scope magazine In a robust conversation, the French filmmaker (Demonlover) addresses the movies’ evasion of the present, the ways electronic media have affected filmmaking and film watching, and the purpose of writing about movies, among too many other pertinent topics to list. Apart from J. Hoberman’s book The Dream Life (an Odessa Steps montage of accelerating cinematic and political upheaval in the ’60s) and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s spirited appraisal of the overlooked Looney Tunes: Back in Action in the Chicago Reader, the single most engaging piece of film criticism I read all year.
4. Billy Bob Thornton Not just Bad Santa’s surly MVP, but one of the most consistently natural, unaffected and interesting actors working in movies today. In small parts, he’s a seasoning that’s often tastier than the main course. He hijacked Intolerable Cruelty for a few welcome minutes as a billionaire doofus, and when I saw Love Actually, the very sight of him made the audience cheer. Also noted with pleasure: Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell in Old School, pretty much everyone in Mystic River, and Renee Zellweger in Cold Mountain, doing the Walter Brennan role better than anybody since Walter Brennan.
3. Jean-Louis Costes, Nov. 18 at Shirley Street Station Unpublicized at the promoter’s request—no sense distracting the cops with unfaked sex acts and purposeful nudity in the middle of a strip-club zone—this French performance artist’s sacrificial-rite musical The Holy Virgin Cult deployed shock theater with genuine artistry, vaudevillian energy and a slaughterhouse stocked with sacred cattle. An actor and musician who’s appeared in the most controversial French films of the past decade, Irréversible and Baise-Moi, Costes refused to allow the local audience its usual arms-folded comfort zone of indifference. He and his two collaborators charged naked into the small but astonished crowd, wielding raw chickens and a blow-up Madonna leaking fluid from every orifice. And the result, for once, was excitement and engagement instead of mere consumption. While the rest of the city slept, 30 people sat in a David Lynch psycho-lounge watching two naked men smear each other with chocolate syrup. You snooze, you lose.
2. Kill Bill Vol. 1 Celluloid crack.
1. Sunset, approx. 4:35 p.m. Nov. 18 Not just any sunset, mind you—a savage Van Gogh stippling of storm clouds and sunlight that streaked the sky with fire and bruises. Through the plate-glass window of a 100 Oaks superstore, it looked like an advancing tidal wave of flame—a reckoning. Outside, shoppers stood stopped in their tracks, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as reflecting puddles on the asphalt smoldered like magma. When I tried to call people to tell them to look, the phones were down. Sometimes nature sends us a message if it thinks we aren’t paying attention. Such a sky does not happen by accident. I still wonder what it means.
Honorable mentions “Hey Ya!,” OutKast (from Speakerboxxx/The Love Below); The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; the “Directors” series DVDs spotlighting Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze; “Still,” Elvis Costello (from North); TV’s Arrested Development and Reno 911; City of God; the Superbad Superblack CD of vintage blaxploitation radio trailers; and Bill O’Reilly exposing himself as an utter jackass on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Michael McCall
Johnny Cash, video for “Hurt,” directed by Mark Romanek The Man in Black had been writing his epitaph for years before his death Sept. 12. The song choices on his final albums continually spoke of salvation and contrition, of death and decay, of a life both glorious and full of sin. As if on cue, his final artistic statement surveyed his life and his difficult final years with unblinking honesty. His unexpected cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” had been a highlight of 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around; director Mark Romanek’s artful video juxtaposed the vitality of Cash’s life with the erosion that comes with age, making it the perfect swan song to his outsized career.
Unlike most of Cash’s obituaries, the video didn’t concentrate on his hell-raising side. The images in “Hurt” commemorated all of his touchstones: family, faith, farming, reflection, identification with the poor and dispossessed—and, yes, his dark, wild spirit. They also reiterated the reason Cash is so idolized: He delved into the most tender areas of humanity and bravely revealed his flaws while maintaining his dignity and pride. Meanwhile, the large Cash-Carter clan—reeling from losing its matriarch, patriarch and one of many dark sheep within a matter of months—persevered through funerals, award shows and televised memorials with a togetherness that didn’t hide their hurt or dent their pride. The image of the extended family standing on the stage of Ryman Auditorium at the end of a tribute concert, hugging and crying and linking arms and pressing on, is one just as indelible as those depicted in the video of “Hurt.”
Shelby Lynne, Identity Crisis (Capitol)/ Annie Lennox, Bare (J) Two bold, enigmatic artists with amazingly expressive voices and guarded public personas open up to create the most personal, most emotional collections of their careers. Lynne’s is a stripped-down affair that draws on all manner of Southern roots music, including R&B, blues, gospel, country and roadhouse rock. Lennox’s album is a lush, carefully arranged set full of tender, aching beauty. Both delve into pain and heartbreak with a directness that presents a potent question: Why does love have to be so damn hard?
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Simon & Schuster)/Charles Bowden, Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family (Simon & Schuster) Two outstanding examples of investigative reporting set in opposite poles of America—one in a rough part of New York City, the other in El Paso, Mexico and along the Mexican-American border. Both portray a single family and their extended relationships to take a hard look at aspects of U.S. society the media usually ignores—or rarely represents with such honesty and depth. The stories focus on personal ambition, illegal drugs, crime, murder, governmental corruption and riches-to-ruins rides. In one telling turn, the family mired in poverty and lack of opportunity ends up being the one to offer hope that an individual can pull him- or herself from the chaos of a community spinning out of control. The triumph of both books lies in how they expose a reality that won’t be televised.
Rodney Crowell, Fate’s Right Hand (DMZ/Columbia)/Vince Gill, Next Big Thing (MCA) No midlife crisis here: Two veteran songwriters offer up a collection of self-penned songs as bold and penetrating as anything they’ve created. Crowell probes big questions of spirituality, life’s meaning and his struggle with vanity, ambition and walking the line. Gill’s songs are personal and reflective in a different way, examining relationships and career themes with a strength, truthfulness and generosity that’s just as revealing and powerful. Both albums display humor, guilt, anger, love and the conflicting desires that attend a life of passion and inner peace.
Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, “Reliquary of a Child,” from Danielpour: In the Arms of the Beloved (Arabesque) A wealth of new classical music exists these days, although it dwells almost wholly outside American media and popular culture. That’s a shame, because music as powerful and accessible as 47-year-old composer Richard Danielpour’s “Reliquary of a Child,” written after the death of a close friend’s child and performed with exquisite sensitivity and beauty by one of America’s most outstanding trios, should be celebrated for the grand achievement that it is.
Bill Friskics-Warren
Johnny Cash, 1932-2003 Celebrities die all the time, but Johnny Cash was different: The figure he cut, the way he sounded and the things he stood for are etched into popular consciousness as ineradicably as the countenances chiseled into Mt. Rushmore. We can take consolation in knowing that he and June, who died in May, somehow are reunited, as they believed they would be. But for many who remain behind, Cash’s passing is tantamount to losing a moral and emotional compass of the fixity and magnitude of the North Star.
Real-Life Power Puff Girls Three bands of fem action heroes flexed mightily this year: Northern State, a trio of liberal, well-heeled MCs from Long Island; Fannypack, a street-smart, multi-culti tag team of Brooklyn singing-rappers; and Puffy AmiYumi, a pair of rock semiotics savants from Tokyo. Each made some of the catchiest, most undeniable recordings of ’03, and each came armed with a TV-ready theme song: “Trinity” (Northern State), “The Theme From Fannypack” and “Teen Titans” (Puffy). “So Stylistic” is the way that a spongy dub workout by Fannypack put it—and how.
Alternative Country? 2003 was the year Music Row trumped alt-country at its own game. Patty Loveless made a mountain-pop classic that eclipses anything in Alison’s or Gillian’s catalog. Tony Brown and Tim DuBois put out a Louvin Brothers tribute that rivals the best of Gram and Emmylou. George Strait made a Texas dancehall record for the ages, while Toby and Hank Jr. released nuanced throwdowns worthy of the Bottle Rockets. Vince and a half-dozen upstarts did themselves proud too, but best of all was Brooks & Dunn’s Red Dirt Road (Arista), a country-soul wonder that has all the rootsy “authenticity” Uncle Tupelites crave—punch, heart and loads of the requisite retro sonic allusions. Had alt-country spawned an album as totemic as Red Dirt Road—and as filled with transcendence and grace—it indeed might have become the next big thing.
Year of the Blues Sure, the glut of reissues that greeted the Congress-appointed “Year of the Blues” was swell, even if the cultural imperialism inherent in all the “secret history of rock ’n’ roll” marketing was galling. And the less said about the Scorsese series on PBS, the better. But the real testimony to the durability and elasticity of the blues were the new releases by the likes of Eric Bibb, Howard Tate, Robert Cray, Johnnie Taylor, James Blood Ulmer and, especially, Betty Lavette, whose A Woman Like Me (Blues Express) might be the best contemporary blues album since Cray’s Strong Persuader.
Olympia Vernon, Eden (Grove Press) Gritty doesn’t begin to describe Vernon’s Eden, a gripping first novel about a 14-year-old girl from rural Mississippi and her embattled female elders. Redolent of the rawboned recordings of Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson, Vernon’s visceral prose commingles dirt, blood and other human stains to convey a haunting, and often erotic, sense of the blues as lived.
Dan Baum, “Jack Leg,” The New Yorker, Sept. 15 The most absorbing piece of writing about music I read this year wasn’t a feature about a band or a record review, but a voluminous study in pharmaco-ethnomusicology that appeared in The New Yorker. In “Jack Leg,” Dan Baum traces the spread of a palsy-inducing epidemic cited in prewar recordings by everyone from Gene Autry to The Mississippi Sheiks. Also known as “jake walk,” the condition was attributed to the ingestion of a cost-cutter brew of Prohibition-era patent medicine consumed mainly by drifters and poor folk in the South and out West. The piece isn’t just a dazzling bit of writing and detective work; it serves as haunting testimony to the misery that invariably attends poverty—and to how it so often gets swept under the rug.
Second Helping? Critics heralded 2003 as a Southern rock renaissance par excellence, but apart from the Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day (New West), a grungy, empathetic beacon worthy of Street Survivors, don’t believe the hype. Critical faves My Morning Jacket sound less like a Southern Radiohead than like Neil Young fronting the Moody Snooze. And the much ballyhooed Kings of Leon are all right, in a Foghat sort of way—that is, except when they slow the boogie down, at which point they devolve into Savoy Brown. Or is it Golden Earring? At least the Bottle Rockets are back, not that they’re Southern or anything.
God and Globalization in Hip-Hop On Spirit in Stone (Quannum Projects), good-humored Oregon rap trio Lifesavas push God, life and decency and rarely get preachy; it helps that they have the beats—hard and steadfast, with dollops of jazz and dancehall—to back it all up. On Wooden Leather (Atlantic), Bowling Green’s Nappy Roots take their barnyard rap worldwide, siding with hard-pressed people everywhere, just as liberation theologians promise God does. Damn positive, all around.
James Wood, The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Thomas Bunting, the protagonist of this often riotous novel of ideas, is a lapsed Ph.D. candidate and compulsive liar whose crisis of faith has him secretly compiling a tome arguing that the existence of suffering means God must be a monster—or dead. It’s only with the death of his human father, a theology professor turned Anglican vicar, that Bunting starts gaining a measure of second sight, in the process giving lie to his secret project—as well as this novel’s title.
Bruce Barry
2003 was a charming one if war, terrorism, disease and corruption are your idea of charm. Here’s my selective list of events that collectively suggest next year can’t help but be an improvement (but then again, that’s what I said a year ago).
Jan. 9—Proliferation North Korea withdraws from the 1985 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, something no country has ever done. The North Korean government declares “no intention to produce nuclear weapons.... Our nuclear activities at this stage will be confined only to peaceful purposes.” Six months later, North Korea announces it has processed enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear weapons.
Jan. 28—Obfuscation President Bush in the State of the Union address says, “Sometimes peace must be defended. A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all.” He mentions Saddam Hussein’s efforts to buy uranium in Africa and import aluminum tubes for nuclear development. A few days later, Colin Powell tells the U.N. about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, insisting that “every statement I make today is backed up by...solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts.” Six weeks later, President Bush starts a war in Iraq without U.N. approval, even as polls show less than half of Americans favoring war in Iraq without U.N. approval.
Feb. 1—Disintegration The space shuttle Columbia breaks apart upon reentry into the atmosphere, killing its crew of seven. After the disaster, President Bush’s aides discuss how it would “affect his efforts to rally public opinion behind a war with Iraq.” Six months later, the board investigating the accident issues a scathing 248-page report, predicting the loss of more shuttles and astronauts unless NASA transforms its “broken safety culture.”
March 5—Adjudication The U.S. Supreme Court upholds California’s “Three Strikes” law, holding that a 50-year sentence without parole for stealing some videotapes is neither cruel, unusual nor disproportionate. In another case, the court rules that a $145 million damage award against an insurance company with almost $50 billion in annual revenue was disproportionate. Proportionality is a beautiful thing.
April 21—Discrimination Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) says of the Texas sodomy case, “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.” A White House spokesman says the president thinks Santorum is “doing a good job as senator” and “is an inclusive man.”
May 1—Exaggeration President Bush alights on an aircraft carrier in a jumpsuit and trumpets victory in Iraq in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner that he later said was put up there by carrier crew members, conveniently omitting the fact that they did so at the behest of White House officials.
Aug. 19—Detonation A suicide truck bomber demolishes U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 20 and wounding over 100—the deadliest attack on the organization in its history. Six days later, two car bombs explode minutes apart, killing 50 people in the heart of Bombay.
Sept. 10—Reincarnation Two years after 9/11, a newly released videotape features Osama bin Laden and one of his lieutenants calling on like-minded obsessives to “devour the Americans” and “bury them in the Iraqi graveyard.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reassures us that the tape is merely part of an “information operations campaign” intended to “terrorize people and frighten them.”
Sept. 26—Deprivation New Census Bureau figures show 1.7 million more Americans living in poverty in 2002 compared to 2001, bringing the total to 34.6 million. The number of people without health insurance rose by 2.4 million to 43.6 million total. Is this a great country, or what?
Oct. 7—Infatuation California voters take leave of their senses, installing an actor, former bodybuilder and serial groper with no experience or relevant qualifications as their governor. Res ipsa loquitur.
Oct. 28—Investigation The first civil suits are filed in a widening scandal on corruption in the mutual fund industry. One official describes the industry’s widespread trading abuses as “outrageous and deceitful.” The Securities and Exchange Commission turns out once again to have been asleep at the switch.
Nov. 25—Dissimulation Congress gives final approval to a controversial Medicare reform bill, including a prescription drug benefit. President Bush says, “For the sake of our seniors, we got something done.” He neglects to mention the drug and insurance companies whose future profits the measure is tailor-made to protect.
Dec. 5—Revelation Scientists announce the discovery of a 425-million-year-old fossilized penis—the oldest penis in the fossil record —belonging to a tiny animal like a water-flea whose penis can be as much as a third of the size of its entire body. There’s a clear opening here for a Dick Cheney quip, but I’ll leave that one be.
Noel Murray
1. Constantines, Shine a Light (Sub Pop) Track for track, there were better and more enduring rock records released in 2003 (see No. 2), but Constantines and Fiery Furnaces (see No. 10) did the most with the form, moving beyond angular, scuzzy retro-punk and inventing new ways to describe the decay of the modern world and the joy that can be had in kicking around the rubble.
2. Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers (S-Curve/Virgin)/The New Pornographers, Electric Version (Matador)/The White Stripes, Elephant (V2) The unassailables: albums that’ll be making lists and winning new fans for decades to come.
3. June Carter Cash, Wildwood Flower (Dualtone) More memento than music, Wildwood Flower is a lovely sketch of June Carter Cash’s final days, as she enjoyed a casual, quiet, warm recording session with Johnny and hummed away at old standards steeped in the description of fading moments.
4. Josh Rouse, 1972 (Rykodisc) 1972 seemed a shoo-in to be Josh Rouse’s commercial breakthrough, given its bright, accessible throwback sound and catchy choruses, but it’s been a slow builder. If Rouse could get these songs into a car commercial or something, maybe people would come around to his affecting vision of a world where perfect music redeems clumsy relationships.
5. The Rosebuds, TheRosebudsMakeOut (Merge) The Rosebuds’ snappy debut album initially sounds like winning but slight guitar-pop, but on repeated spins, the clever arrangements, witty lyrics and bright melodies begin to settle around the brain like a fishnet. It’s not easy to make music this close to flawless.
6. Cursive, The Ugly Organ (Saddle Creek)/Nada Surf, Let Go (Barsuk)/The Postal Service, Give Up (Sub Pop) All either tangentially or directly associated with the “emo” movement, these three bands demonstrate how the genre has grown—in expressiveness and ambition—beyond the scope of insular indie rock and modern-rock self-absorption. Cursive especially have carried navel-gazing to compellingly bloody, winsomely sad, admirably pretentious extremes. It dares greatness and hits the mark.
7. The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow (Sub Pop) The Shins’ singer-songwriter James Mercer synchs ’60s-style romantic melancholy with the room-filling resound of modern rock, pulling his audience through dreamily hooky abstraction. Chutes Too Narrow is a compendium of cool sounds, masquerading as mood-painting.
8. Sun Kil Moon, Ghosts of the Great Highway (Jetset) Mark Kozelek’s new band make the most accessible music of his career, highlighting his angst-ridden voice and the slow-flowing interplay of folky acoustic guitars and thick, scorching electric guitars. Packed with dream imagery and snippets of personal and pop history, the intricately woven, semi-mystical mid-tempo folk-rock sounds like what would happen if Neil Young had wandered into a Fleetwood Mac recording session around 1976.
9. Pernice Brothers, Yours, Mine & Ours (Ashmont) The delicately tart story-songs of Joe Pernice sound sweet and shiny, but the words plead almost desperately for some quiet moments of communion while “waiting for the universe to die.”
10. The Fiery Furnaces, Gallowsbird’s Bark (Rough Trade) Sixteen tracks of cheerful chaos, ending on a mellow, spooky note with an apocalyptic trilogy: the shiny acoustic guitars and bluesy slide of “Tropical Ice-land,” the doleful piano plunk and feedback whine of “Rub Alcohol Blues” and the shrill, terrifying stomp of “We Got Back the Plague.”
Honorable Mentions: Belle & Sebastian, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Caitlin Cary, The Clientele, Jay-Z, Kings of Leon, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, My Morning Jacket, OutKast, The Sea & Cake, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros, Rufus Wainwright, M. Ward, Zwan.
Martin Brady
Dwight Yoakam, “The Back of Your Hand,” from Population Me (Audium) Dwight Yoakam’s latest CD has received some mixed reviews, but what is not in doubt is the strange beauty and edgy reflectiveness of the album’s closing tune, “The Back of Your Hand.” In detailing the incidentals of a relationship going bad, it gets at the heart of melancholy without an ounce of sentiment. The backstory on this amazing song is also of interest: Yoakam heard the demo of songwriter/actor Gregg Lee Henry while hanging out on a movie set with Henry’s pal and fellow actor, Bruce Greenwood, whereupon Yoakam decided he had to record it. It’s a 3:08 jewel, uncovered by happenstance, and a restorative to the notion of serious songwriting that can really move the spirit.
Nashville Opera Association Nashville Opera proves that high art isn’t just for rich folks decked out in furs and jewels. Stirring 2003 productions such as Tosca and Pagliacci, under the guidance of inspirational artistic director John Hoomes, proved that denim-clad people with middle incomes are discovering opera’s bright colors, dramatic music and eye-catching pageantry. (The NOA had to turn patrons away from the final performance of Pagliacci.) For the modern theatergoer looking to forget about life for a few hours, opera’s got all the bells and whistles, not to mention serious emotional intent. That it’s happening in a big way in the country music capital of the world is a tribute to NOA’s forward leadership and legit artistic enthusiasm.
Einstein’s Dreams It may not have attracted a broad audience base, but this collaboration between Mockingbird Theatre and People’s Branch Theatre, presented in two separate engagements at TPAC’s Johnson Theater, gave Nashville a glimpse of what live theater can at least purport to be: intellectually pitched, innovative in its use of space and performed with a sincere sense of experimentation. The adaptation of Alan Lightman’s award-winning book was co-written and directed by David Alford, who just recently was appointed interim artistic director of Tennessee Repertory Theatre. We probably can’t expect to see a whole lot of this kind of fare on the Rep’s near-term stages, but it’s reassuring to know that Alford likes to operate in the otherworldly arenas of the time/space continuum.
Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi (Knopf) Hendrickson’s journalistically weighty investigation of 1960s Southern law officers, brought together during calamitous times at Ole Miss, gives us civil-rights-era history and sociology and fascinating storytelling all under one cover. Maybe, with its images of redneck sheriffs and its recollection of critical national growing pains, his effort also serves as a gentle yet manfully written reminder that the hardest lessons about getting society closer to openness and brotherly love have been learned, and (hopefully) we shall not pass that way again.
Bill Feehely in A Night in November Yet another local theatrical event that should have been seen by more people, Feehely’s performance in this one-person show was simply masterful, exposing us to a truly pro-level actor at the top of his game. Solo theatrical pieces are tough to deliver on, but he made it look organic. Feehely doesn’t necessarily have matinee-idol pretensions, but the dude is a worker and a builder and a craftsman, and despite his solid performance earlier in 2003 in A Moon for the Misbegotten, it’s A Night in November that lent the past theatrical year in Nashville some real cultural cachet.
Jeff Midkiff, Partners in Time (Etheria Music) Midkiff has been a serious musician and educator for years. He’s distinguished himself as a regular in various bluegrass groups, but until now hasn’t had a solo podium to fully exhibit his technical virtuosity. His debut CD is a beauty, showcasing his clean, dynamic mandolin playing as well as his rich and tasteful approach as a fiddler. Midkiff authored six of the 10 selections, displaying an eclectic sensibility that takes the listener from good-time folkie rave-ups (“Grey Hawk”) and traditional lyricism (“Goodbye Liza Jane”) to more exotic realms (“Alhambra”). Midkiff also serves up Reinhardt-esque treatments of Tin Pan Alley standbys like “Summertime” and “Oh, Lady Be Good,” then closes with a rousing cover of “Monroe’s Hornpipe.” 2003 is the year he stepped out into the limelight, and judging by this effort, it’s about time.
TSU’s Performing Arts Center In a town in need of classy, accessible theater space, the 2003 opening of this multimillion-dollar resource in North Nashville has to be considered a significant cultural event. Not only do the students at Tennessee State University benefit from state-of-the-art facilities, but the powers-that-be at the school are showing a willingness to open the PAC’s doors for use by outside performance groups. If the outreach matches the presumed need, then, in a way, a critical problem might be solved. There’s even ample free parking.
Ron Wynn
1. The resurgence of the jazz vocalist Pre-rock standards, show tunes and scat singing are now officially in vogue again, as witnessed by new records by Van Morrison, Boz Scaggs, Bette Midler, Aaron Neville, Rod Stewart and others.
2. Soul Survivors Not only did the Rev. Al Green reunite with producer Willie Mitchell for his first secular album in more than two decades, but old-school soul types Howard Tate and Mighty Sam McClain issued marvelous records, Michael McDonald ably saluted Motown, and the new generation was nicely represented by Ellis Hooks, Calvin Richardson, Anthony Hamilton and Joss Stone.
3. Mystic River An undeniable masterpiece, Mystic River is Eastwood’s finest movie since Unforgiven, a morally ambiguous, dark and sobering work sparked by great performances from Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon.
4. The Dells Arguably R&B and soul’s most underrated vocal ensemble, The Dells were voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, finally getting the mainstream recognition they deserve.
5. Ishmael Reed, Another Day at the Front: Dispatches From the Race War (Basic) An exceptional novelist, playwright and commentator, Reed returns with this scathing, irreverent and frequently hilarious new collection of essays, his first in 10 years.
6. Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf) Hopefully, the subsequent volumes of this Nobel winner’s autobiography will be as rich and superbly written as this one, which goes from his birth in 1927 to his marriage in the 1950s.
7. Mississippi State shatters tradition The Southeastern Conference’s shameful record of never having hired an African American football coach was thankfully erased when State hired former Alabama All-American and longtime college and pro football coach Sylvester Croom as its new head man.
8. Year of the Blues Despite questionable inclusions and woeful omissions, both this year’s PBS series and host of special recordings, reissues and anthologies gave the blues some overdue national attention.
9. Comedy Central At a time when cloning Law & Order and CSI is considered a gutsy creative move at the networks, Comedy Central offered the boldest, funniest pair of shows on broadcast or cable with The Daily Show and Chappelle’s Show.
10. The dominance of hip-hop, R&B and urban music Anytime a bland pop jock like Rick Dees is playing crunk on his Top 40 show, it’s a sign that the music has emerged as the sound of Young America. Like it or not, rap and R&B are for now what Motown and Stax were to the mid-’60s.
David Maddox
When asked to pick the most significant cultural events in the past year, one way to look at it is that what’s most significant is what occurs where you are. Localism becomes more important every year as a monolithic culture, the product of an inexorable commercial and political logic for consolidation and expansion, penetrates deeper into social, psychic, economic and physical space. Here are best-of lists for music and visual arts, more or less chronological within each category. Plenty of these artists came from out of town, but when they’re here, they’re ours.
Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, Feb. 22 at Acklen house party Flaherty played sax relentlessly, the fruit of a lifetime of going his own way and staying “local” back East. Corsano was a revelation, a young, technically amazing drummer, and musically wise beyond his years. This show took place at a house party, which was a great way to cohabit with the music.
LaDonna Smith, June 21 at Ruby Green This Birmingham-based musician makes avant-garde improvisation a deeply Southern art form by insisting that it teem with humor and storytelling. Using viola and voice, she converted a conversation with her 100-year-old aunt from earlier in the day into a performance at Ruby Green that was part narrative and part abstract play in sound and rhythm. She also did a hilarious piece about dogs. Her show challenged people like me who take all this stuff so seriously to lighten up.
Davey Williams and Martin Klapper, Oct. 3 at Springwater Guitarist Williams, the other heavyweight on the Birmingham new music scene, came to Nashville with Copenhagen-based percussionist Klapper. Williams is a great musician, but everything was overshadowed by Klapper’s “kit”—two card tables crammed with toys of all sorts and colors, which he blew, struck, threw, hit and switched on to make noises that were as fun to watch as they were to hear.
Peggy Snow sings Mahler In German. With the Cherry Blossoms. At Springwater. Peggy’s voice is so tender, it’s the perfect vehicle for Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. Hang it up, Blair School of Music—let’s have more late Romantic pieces performed where you can buy beer by the pitcher.
Parts and Labor, Nov. 20 at Springwater It’s 2 in the morning, a bleary-eyed time on a school night, and then this synthesizer-led New York band starts up and cuts through the fuzziness with sharp, bright sounds and tight song structures that bounce ferociously like cybernetic bunnies.
“Glass of the Avant Garde,” Cheekwood The most voluptuous show this year. Object after exquisite object made in Central Europe during the years 1900-1938. The glass was molded, cut, etched, blasted and painted, with a consistently elevated sense of shape and image. Stylistically, it covered a trajectory from Art Nouveau into the classic modernism of the Bauhaus, all of it threaded with idealism about the importance and concrete value of design.
Dorna McDonald May This year at Garage Mahal, May had a show of her nature-oriented fantasies that dig for deep connections with the earth, arriving, whether intended or not, at an inherent paganism. But her gallery show was missing the family portraits she exhibited earlier in the year at the Renaissance Center in Dickson. Those paintings of her husband, children, kids-in-law and infant grandchild overflowed with love and affection for her family.
Amy Pleasant, Ruby Green Yet another visitor from Birmingham! This one-person show gave Pleasant room to lay out her almost scientific way of analyzing the world through the process of painting. She envisions human experience in pattern and representation, recorded in paintings with a lovely understated quality.
“The Art of Tennessee,” Frist Center for the Visual Arts This is the kind of show we expect from the Frist Center—broad in scope, thorough and stimulating both in the objects on display and the ideas built into the show’s structure. It succeeded particularly well in bringing out Tennessee art’s historical foundations. Given that a high portion of the local visual arts GDP is going to go the Frist, all we ask is that they do something this good year in and year out.
Todd McDaniel, Fugitive Art Center A Nashville painter of abstractions that brood and glow. These works displayed attentiveness and an economy of means worthy of a Zen master. He doesn’t show his paintings often, so I was glad to have had this chance to see them.
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.
2. Mariane Pearl, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Daniel Pearl (Scribner) A heartrending, double profile in courage. Mariane, a former journalist, was five months pregnant when her husband was abducted, and in the continuing blitz of post-Sept. 11 news, her intelligent, graceful and strong appeals to her husband’s kidnappers on CNN may have been already forgotten. A Mighty Heart represents the hope that the Pearls’ story will be remembered, for many reasons, long after the rhetoric about Homeland Security and weapons of mass destruction has faded.
3. New York Review of Books I probably wouldn’t have known about Mariane Pearl’s book or Joyce King’s Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas (Pantheon), to name just two titles, without the biweekly arrival of the New York Review of Books, which was founded during the 1963 newspaper strike in New York City. A combination of the New York Times’ front page and its book review, the NYRB’s regular contributors include Joan Didion, Robert Hughes, Garry Wills, Luc Sante and Larry McMurtry, all of whom were represented in the superb 40th anniversary issue, which came out Nov. 6.
4. Oxford American, 1992-2003 (?) I continue to mourn the demise of the Oxford American earlier this year. Almost every Nashville writer of note was published or reviewed in its pages. The fabulous summer music issue, with its always surprising, always first-rate compilation CD, will be missed with special poignancy if some miraculous resurrection doesn’t take place in Little Rock, Ark., where Marc Smirnoff had moved the magazine in hopes of better and continued funding.
5. Roy Blount Jr., Robert E. Lee: A Penguin Biography Blount’s biography of Robert E. Lee offers not only a refreshing conciseness and a refusal of hagiography, but it also manages, in just over 200 pages, a profoundly impressive assimilation of the vast literature surrounding Lee and the Civil War. The last accomplishment will doubtless surprise readers who think of Blount as a more intellectual Lewis Grizzard; in truth, the brevity and sense of timing that are the humorist’s stock-in-trade will make even staunch fans of Douglas Southall Freeman’s worshipful three-volume biography of Lee wish that writer had served an apprenticeship as a joke-writer. On the other hand, those who find nothing admirable about Lee will find it difficult to finish Blount’s book without the empathic understanding that the Confederate general didn’t have the contemporary luxury of being riven merely by inner conflict.
6. Photography books With Diane Arbus’ Revelations (Random House) and Mary Ellen Mark’s Arbus-influenced Twins (Aperture), two of the year’s most important photography books belong to Southern geniuses Sally Mann and William Eggleston. Mann’s What Remains (Bulfinch) and Eggleston’s Los Alamos (Scalo Verlag) are what publishers so often claim and what so rarely is true: instant classics. TVA Photography: Thirty Years of Life in the Tennessee Valley (University Press of Mississippi), by Patricia Bernard Ezzell, includes photographs that rival Walker Evans’ work from the same era; and while it’s not a photography book, strictly speaking, James McPherson’s new illustrated edition of The Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford University Press) expands our knowledge of Civil War photography vastly beyond Matthew Brady.
7. Poetry collections I’ve already written in the Scene about Collected Poems of Robert Lowell; collected editions of the works of Pablo Neruda and Ted Hughes; and a valuable array of books about Sylvia Plath timed to coincide with this year’s biopic. So I’ll say no more other than the obvious: These books represent cultural landmarks and should be read.
8. The Year of the Blues What can possibly be added to the discussion of the pluses, minuses, delights and disasters that marked “The Year of the Blues”? Perhaps it’s appropriate to give the final word to Dick Waterman’s Between Midnight and Day: The Last Blues Archive (Thunder’s Mouth Press) and The Blues (Amistad), the companion book to the PBS series. Contributors to the latter range from John Lee Hooker to William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison to Eudora Welty to David Halberstam to Elmore Leonard to Luc Sante to Suzan-Lori Parks.
9. Reetika Vazirani, 1962-2003 The acclaimed and accomplished young poet Vazirani, a former Nashville resident, died this summer. Author of White Elephants (Barnard New Women Poets’ Series) and World Hotel (Copper Canyon Press), she wrote often of her Indian homeland, once saying that “An exile is a kind of suicide.” We should mourn not only her death, but also the fact that there will be no more such lines, a brilliant microcosm of the experience of diaspora that affects more and more Americans, including natives.
Jon Weisberger
The AKUS-Shania connection From their joint performance of Shania Twain’s “Forever and for Always” on CMT’s Flameworthy Awards, to their hour-long NBC appearance in November, the collaboration between country-pop goddess Twain and the bluegrass-based Alison Krauss + Union Station was bound to collide deliciously with all kinds of notions about authenticity and “real” music. The ultimate surprise, though, was not the revelation that Shania can really sing, but the sight of Krauss, self-proclaimed lover of sad songs, belting out harmonies on a slew of relentlessly upbeat ones.
The Return of Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver They weren’t ever really gone, but 2003 has been the best year in years for one of bluegrass’s greatest institutions. From the Opry stage to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s awards to television, the mandolin master and his crew were more visible than ever, pointing the way toward their upcoming 25th anniversary with the release of the year’s best bluegrass album.
The Nashville Classic Music Festival, Oct. 10-11 Sure, there’s the Station Inn, the Opry’s outdoor extravaganzas and the “Bluegrass at the Ryman” series, but opportunities to experience a real-deal bluegrass festival in the Nashville area have been few and far between. Boasting a top-notch lineup, an appropriately rural setting (Smiley Hollow in Ridgetop) and even the dubious joys of festival food, the Classic filled a serious gap in Nashville’s array of bluegrass offerings.
Del McCoury joins the Grand Ole Opry, Oct. 25 The Opry couldn’t have chosen a better addition to its cast than McCoury, who personifies both tradition (he first appeared on the Opry with Bill Monroe when the show was still at the Ryman) and innovation, effortlessly translating blues, rock and Americana into bluegrass. Leftover Salmon and Phish fans storming the Opry ticket windows? Thanks to Del, it could happen.
The Ascent of Joe Nichols Neo-traditional country doesn’t have a more promising representative than Nichols, who earned newcomer awards from both the ACM and CMA this year before scoring a Grammy nomination for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. “What Nashville needs,” songwriter Larry Cordle said a couple of years ago, “is a new kid in here who wants to do country music and can sell it to people his age.” In Nichols, it’s got one.
J.D. Crowe inducted into the IBMA Hall of Honor, Oct. 2 Crowe’s induction marked the IBMA’s welcome return to honoring solidly bluegrass artists after several years of peripheral honors. Boldly experimental when he wants to be, stoutly traditional when he’s so inclined, the banjo player and baritone singer has schooled some greats (Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley and Jerry Douglas among them) and created a stunning body of recordings. He also continues to burn up the road with a band every bit the equal of his greatest past lineups.
Nashville Star It could have been even better, but the USA Network’s country music talent contest presented some strong contenders who illuminated the differences that still exist between the pop and country worlds. Even if you thought Buddy Jewell was ultimately a snoozer, there was undeniable satisfaction in watching as his success demonstrated that the recording industry’s gatekeepers don’t always get it as right as they like to think.
Bluegrass on TV The All-Star Bluegrass Celebration II and the recently aired Gaither Bluegrass Gospel Homecoming kept bluegrass front and center on the small screen, featuring wide-ranging assortments of the music’s biggest stars and most enjoyable talents, from the Lewis Family’s antic Little Roy to legends like Mac Wiseman to up-and-comers like preteen mandolinist Sierra Hull—and both were taped right here in Nashville.
Various artists, Livin’, Lovin’, Losin’ (Universal South) Country music thrives artistically when it reminds itself of its roots, and nothing did the job with more grace and elegance this year than producer Carl Jackson’s tribute to the Louvin Brothers. Pairing mainstream, bluegrass and Americana stars on both familiar classics and neglected ought-to-be-standards, the album is just about perfect, right down to the inspired identification of each duet’s partners as singing the “Ira” and “Charlie” parts. Beyond a doubt, it’s the year’s best country album.
The Dixie Chicks firestorm The year’s biggest downer was the way that country’s top group was banished from the airwaves and reviled by an assortment of nutcases for Natalie Maines’ offhand comment about President Bush last March. There were reasonable critics and intemperate defenders, to be sure, but a torrent of hate-filled rhetoric—and, of course, the cut-and-run move of country radio programmers—made for an ugly, depressing affair devoid of redeeming social value.
Bill Levine
Top concerts that more people should have seen or that should have been allowed to continue longer:
Afro-Cuban All Stars, April 14 at Langford Auditorium If this group’s polyrhythms and stylized vocal-and-horn ripostes can get folks dancing in the aisles and sometimes onstage at Langford Auditorium, tucked away in Vanderbilt University’s medical megaplex, it’s a welcome sign of life. Is there a Nashville equivalent of Roseland for this sort of concert?
The Nu Band, April 10 at Café 123 A late show on a dreary spring Thursday night, and there wasn’t even enough of a crowd for a poker game, much less the closest thing to an avant supergroup. Too far out for this setting? Maybe it would have been better as a house party (see below).
Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, Feb. 22 at Acklen Avenue house party OK, so this was a house party for Nashville’s nearly invisible underground scene, and it was arranged at the last minute. Nonetheless, anyone who’d signed up for one of three local music e-lists would have known. Not a bad turnout for a wet winter night, but many more could have seen altoist Flaherty, an uninhibited standard-bearer of free ’70s energy, blow the rickety old sublet’s walls down. The tempest rose as the younger Corsano body-slammed his drum kit repeatedly, even to the point where a cymbal harmlessly flew into the front row.
George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, Aug. 14 at Dancin’ in the District Why pull the plug at 11 p.m. when the collective were just kicking in after an interminable opening act and Clinton had barely made his delayed entrance? (Not to mention the half-hour or more required to walk from the parking area and wait on line for tickets.) The crowd here was more likely to become a threat to public safety when the show was cut short than if P-Funk had been allowed to get up for the downstroke even another half-hour. But if the foolish consistency of the city’s curfew laws must be enforced, let’s coordinate the event so that the main act has a couple hours to play.
Eric Alexander, Feb. 1 at MTSU’s Jazz Artists Series The format of this series has the featured artists, who conduct clinics and master classes earlier in the day, performing a set backed by the Middle Tennessee Jazz Orchestra. No such guest artist should be coerced into playing encores, much less an entire second set. But if tenor saxophonist Alexander, who was just beginning to hit the peak of his expressive powers, had simply continued soloing while walking out of Wright Music Hall toward the Red Rose or The Boro or any open-armed venue, he would have found a large number of followers, rhythm section or not.
Fred Lonberg-Holm and Terminal 4, May 2 at Guido’s Nothing against the management at Guido’s, who’ve booked and hosted some of the most audacious acts passing through town this year, but many of these performers deserve more than a pass-the-hat, book-by-the-seat-of-your-pants arrangement. This melodically driven chamber-improv group could easily have won over the same crowd that came out to see the Turtle Island String Quartet at Ingram Hall, if that’s not too starchy a venue for free spirits.
Chris Cutler, March 19 at Ruby Green The British percussionist was making his electric toothbrushes and egg slicers sing across his percussion kit, but the biggest surprise was the spirit of the local improvisers, who joined him in the second set, including Craig Nutt blowing through a hollowed wooden branch into an empty Folger’s can. It seems that the only way to fill up the seats at Ruby Green is to host a poetry reading or some other such in-your-face performance art event immediately beforehand, as when improv violinist LaDonna Smith played there a few months later.
Donna Bowman
The 10 hottest writers in 2003:
Laura Hillenbrand Seabiscuit: An American Legend, her best-selling biography of a racehorse, became one of the biggest movies of the year and looks to have several Oscar nominations sewn up. And Hillenbrand told her own story, of years battling chronic fatigue syndrome, in one of the best essays The New Yorker published in 2003. It may take years for the next book, but it will be worth waiting for.
Alan Moore The dean of British comics says that he’s hanging up his script pencil. What a way to go. His Promethea series, exploring the mystical dimensions of the creative process itself, grows more personal, intimate and autobiographical as it approaches its climax. But at the same time, Moore is expanding his vision of the characters he’s created and the themes they embody to embrace all the storytelling arts—and he’s just about to release them to eternity.
Richard Curtis Having completed Love Actually, the ultimate Richard Curtis movie because it’s six Richard Curtis movies crammed into one holiday package, what is he going to do for an encore? The Bridget Jones sequel, of course. Not exactly branching out, is our Richard. So far, we like him that way. As long as he keeps Mr. Bean at arm’s length in the future.
Ralph Greco Writers may not get much credit for reality shows. But somebody has to churn out the stuff that Joe Millionaire’s butler says. Nobody’s done it longer than Greco, story editor on such marathon guilty pleasures as Making the Band, The Bachelor, Big Brother and Who Wants to Be a Playboy Centerfold?, in addition to his writing credit for Joe. If you need the carefully circumscribed chaos of an artificial situation turned into TV-ready narrative, call Ralph.
Sofia Coppola Two movies written, two movies directed, two critical successes. Lost in Translation is going to put Coppola near the top of cinephiles’ IMDB watch lists, in large part for her artistry with language.
Dennis Lehane The veteran mystery writer has rocketed into the media spotlight with Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of his Mystic River in line for Oscar glory. This year’s Shutter Island sent fans of his melancholy, gritty, moody crime stories into their thesauruses searching for superlatives.
Mark Haddon An extraordinary debut, Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time unraveled a family mystery in the voice of an autistic child and hooked readers until the last page. It might have created some new readers for Sherlock Holmes too.
Simon Winchester A man who seems to be making a bid to be named King of All Nonfiction, Winchester released two new hardcovers in 2003: Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. When bibliophiles and popular science mavens both have ready-made Christmas gifts from the same author, it’s been a good year.
Gary Larson/Berkeley Breathed The comics pages are back, baby. Thousands are shelling out more than a C-note for 18 pounds of Gary Larson’s Far Side one-panelers. And Breathed, long in exile, has persuaded 160 newspapers to run his Sunday-only strip Opus in no-compromises half-page glory. If somebody will give a Lifetime Achievement Award to Johnny Hart on the condition that he retire, we’ll be set on the funny pages.
Elaine Pagels One of the few religious scholars to achieve popular success without popularizing her scholarship, Pagels made a breakthrough with this year’s Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. No one shaped by the Christian tradition can ignore the strange brand of the Jesus movement revealed in Thomas, and Pagels tells her own story to make the challenge come to life.
Marcel Smith
Classical music highlights:
Nashville Opera Association The Nashville Opera Association, led since 1995 by John Hoomes and Carol Penterman, has a better consistency record than perhaps any other arts organization in our city. Without a suitable opera venue, NOA has nevertheless fused theatrical spectacle and musical excellence into memorable productions. NOA seeks performers who sound good, look good and act well; getting all three in one person is like trying to fill an inside straight, but NOA commonly gets two out of three. Even when the acting skills don’t merit Oscars, singing and imaginative staging carry the show. This fall’s two offerings, Tosca and Pagliacci, were both powerfully effective, the Pagliacci perhaps the most vocally outstanding to date in Music City.
American Guild of Organists meeting, Dec. 1 The December meeting seemed a normal event for the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists, which meets once each month at a different church. The latest meeting, at St. Ann’s Catholic Church, heard a program by some two dozen undergraduate singers—men and women from Trevecca Nazarene University. Though their director, Dr. Timothy Cierpke, was in the house, the concert itself was elegantly directed by two singing choristers, taking turns. The program’s three sections might have been labeled Very Difficult, Difficult and By No Means Easy. Two selections were accompanied by a harpist; the others were by voices alone. The singers opened with four songs by Eric Whitacre (b. 1970), featuring texts by e.e. cummings, an unhurried unfolding of delicious dissonance. The finale was “A Gaelic Blessing” by John Rutter. In between was a range of demanding material, some in Latin. Their performance level was stunningly high, these young singers giving their hearers a gift worthy of the magi.
Nashville Ballet and Nashville Chamber Orchestra, “The Bell Witch” and “Ouroboros,” Oct. 17-19 Nashville Ballet and the Nashville Chamber Orchestra do a lot of hall-of-fame stuff while attracting attention for original work as well. This year they joined forces in a season opener in which music commissioned by Paul Gambill’s NCO was made visible through original choreography executed by Paul Vasterling’s dance company. Mark Scearce and Conni Ellisor composed the music, while Vasterling and San Francisco-based Anne Marie DeAngelo matched the sounds with their choreography. Powerful performances by orchestra and dancers fostered the sense that a watershed moment had perhaps arrived in our local arts community. These two organizations, with strong and strong-willed directors, chose collaboration over competition in a way that enabled each organization to show itself in a most auspicious light.
Alias Last year a small group of musicians calling themselves Alias—most of them a.k.a. members of the Nashville Symphony—began playing music they wanted to play just for the love of it. Doing it for love, they’ve been playing composers many listeners have never heard of—Einojuhani Rautavaara, Steve Reich, Jeffrey Agrell—in various configurations. They play accurately and tastefully, listening attentively to one another, demonstrating how intimately conversational chamber music can be.
eighth blackbird, Nov. 12 at Langford Auditorium The most incandescent concert in recent memory happened when this sextet of young musicians performed in town, using various combinations of piano, violin, cello, flutes, clarinet and percussion, plus a crystal bowl half-filled with water and rubbed with moistened fingers to produce a sustained, laser-like tone. The music was not conventionally organized: It had no tonal center, it was not something delivered. It was something that evolved, and almost certainly contained spacious improvisations. The musicians did not stay put to play, but moved in an adagio ceremonial dance, as if conversing as the music took shape. There were moments of aggressive noise, but the dominant impression was a comprehensive serenity, emblematized by the singing crystal bowl. Something Robert Frost said about poems fits this music too: “A poem should not mean, but be.”
Jason Shawhan
Alien3 It’s not David Fincher’s director’s cut of Alien3 that has just been released on DVD (first in a box set, then in January on its own), but this extended assembly cut, despite a few missteps involving the scoring, restoration and CG completion shot of one scene, does prove that even the wriggling and destructive tendrils of studio micromanagement cannot keep good filmmaking down. It took 11 years for this masterpiece to finally be shown to the world, and I delight in the crow that many will have to eat. As far as other essential DVDs, the disc for The Haunting (1963) is beautiful, bundled with several goodies and reasonably priced.
Two artists—four albums There’s a part of me that feels that all of the human experience is contained somewhere in the grooves of Speakerboxxx and The Love Below (Arista) by OutKast and La Serpenta Canta and Defixiones—Will and Testament (Mute-UK) by Diamanda Galas. Love, hate, unease and the enduring power of fierce songwriting are the order of the day. Big Boi’s “Unhappy” meshes eerily with Galas’ take on The Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You.” What’s funny to me is that if you combine all four records together, you get Prince’s “God,” from 1984. And that’s more than enough. But as far as what Barry White called “lovemakin’ music,” proceed no further than Steve Burns’ Songs for Dustmites (PIAS America).
Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis I love frogs. I also love purple things. Thus, the discovery of a purple frog in the Western Ghats of India has brought me joy (and a Bad Santa level of joy, at that) and restored a little of my own faith that nature hasn’t completely given up on humanity.
The Lord of the Rings I came late to the whole Lord of the Rings phenomenon, waiting some two years before I could experience all three of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations theatrically within one week-and-a-half period. Wow. All the sense of wonder that I remember from the original Star Wars trilogy and The Muppet Movie and The Neverending Story when I was a kid—which I thought was dead after Episodes I and II of George Lucas’ continuing irrelevancy—came flooding back. Great stories, great characters, great emotions and great filmmaking. The same goes for David Cronenberg’s Spider and Marina de Van’s In My Skin.
Live shows Annie Lennox at the Ryman, Ben Folds and, later, The Flaming Lips at Uptown Mix, and The Ssion at Springwater were all truly exquisite experiences for great live performances (especially when the Lips encored with “What Is the Light” and I almost busted out crying at the bridge). But the number-one most insane and transcendent thing I saw performed in the city this year was French performance artist and provocateur Jean-Louis Costes’ Opera Porno The Holy Virgin Cult. Words cannot encapsulate it, but I will never forget it. The fact that something this moving and shocking can play here even in the midst of the multi-level bait-and-switch that is the second set of Bush years gives me some hope for the future.
Irréversible My best moviegoing experience was seeing Irréversible on opening day at the Belcourt. You know the feeling you get when you’re going the right way on a one-way section of road, but you have to be ready at any second to avert a collision with an idiot? (I’m thinking specifically of the parking lots for Tower Records and the Green Hills 16.) Imagine that tension for an hour and a half. Simply gorgeous. I knew I was alive when that screening ended.
Television TV’s offerings this year would have been horribly bleak were it not for the deliciously weird and engrossing Arrested Development, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (basically because it’s the only reality show about helping people and being decent to one another), and Oxygen’s one-two-three punch of The Sunday Night Sex Show With Sue Johanson, Hey Monie and Bliss.
Food and Drink Let praise be given to Wing Basket on Elliston Place (easily the best wings in the city) and to Mr. Whiskers liquor store for carrying Everclear Purple Passion again.
Songs OutKast’s “Roses” was the anthem for me this year, but other tracks that kept my car moving were the Dave Aude Neuromantic Mix of Annie Lennox’s “Wonderful,” “Bin Laden” by Three 6 Mafia, Venus Hum’s “Soul Sloshing,” Jewel’s “2 Become 1,” the Chi-Lites horn sample from “Are You My Woman” that gave Beyonce “Crazy in Love,” and anything remixed by Gabriel & Dresden.
Philippe Grandrieux There’s a particularly gifted and twisted director lurking out there. He’s made two films, Sombre and La Vie Nouvelle. Neither have gotten any kind of release outside of France and Quebec, but anyone who enjoys the visual and expressive capabilities of cinema should check Grandrieux out. There’s some Francis Bacon in his vibe, a little Brueghel as well, but this guy’s films feel like something strange and new.
