Fantastic Metropolis

Busy year. I didn’t do a lot of listening, viewing, or reading (especially reading) compared to years past—thus this abbreviated list.

21 Grams

Directed by Alejandro González Iñarritu

21 Grams, Alejandro Iñarritu’s (Amores Perros) jigsaw puzzle of a soap opera is the best English language film of the year, propelled by three amazing performances by Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and, most amazing of all, Naomi Watts. I haven’t seen a movie that contained three performances this powerful since I don’t know when. A masterpiece of disjunctive editing, the story opens with Paul (Penn), a mathematician who has received a heart transplant, in bed with Christina (Watts) and for the next couple of hours works its way back toward that scene, along the way introducing us to the tormented Jack (del Toro), an ex-gangbanger who has become a Pentecostal. The narration is not gimmicky as in Memento and Irréversible. It seems absolutely right, a form perfect for the materials and themes. The flaws? Too many coincidences, for one. The movie is essentially a implausible melodrama that’s been run through a wood-chipper and artfully reassembled into a more cunning shape, but nonetheless, I can’t imagine the acting Oscars going to anyone else other than the three principals. Watching these three actors going at each other is to watch an alchemical process that rarely happens on the screen. Depressing, yet it’s so good, you won’t leave the theater depressed, but rather thoughtful and emotional and alerted to the jigsaw puzzle of your own life.

Wire Flowers, Johnny Dowd

Johnny Dowd is Tom Waits without the lyrical pretense. He seems to channel stories about the anonymous, about ordinary tragedy, about the crummy aftershocks of low crime and bad love that are far more authentic than anything Waits ever has done. This is his fifth CD. Like all his albums, it is homely, horrific in places, disturbing, and never less than beautiful in its precise observation. Seeing one of his concerts is kind of a cross between a revival meeting and spending a couple hours with the male half of the couple in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Dowd is the truest poet in American contemporary music.

Soledad, R. G. Vliet

A 1977 novel by a great and virtually Texas writer. In form, a western detailing the actions of an epileptic cowboy who kills a Mexican ranchowner during a cattle drive and travels across Texas, trying to find the woman whose picture he found in the dead man’s wallet. Beautiful naturalistic prose and an authoritative period voice. An almost lost classic.

Onibaba

Directed by Kineto Shindo

I’m ashamed I never saw this film until last year. A masterpiece of Japanese cinema from the 1960s, directed by Kineto Shindo, it’s essentially a folk tale set in medieval Japan. During a bloody conflict between peasants and warlords, a young widow and her mother-in-law live in a hut in the midst of a gigantic sea of reeds; they survive by ambushing solitary soldiers and selling their armor. When the younger woman begins an affair with her dead husband’s best friend, the mother-in-law, fearful she will lose her partner in crime, attempts break the couple of up, and therein hangs this horrifying and erotic tale. The score consists solely of a sinister drumbeat. Shot in gorgeous black-and-white. A horror film like no other.

God’s Chinese Son, Jonathan D. Spence

A non-fiction book that relates the history of the Taiping uprising led by Hong Xiuquan, a man infected by Christian missionary tracts to the point that he believed himself to be the messiah. The uprising, which Spence describes as “Revelations come to life,” overthrew the Qing dynasty, left more than twenty million Chinese dead, and established Hong as a god on earth who ruled from his “Heavenly City.” Yet another underpublicized holocaust. Fascinating stuff.

Book of Hate, Kathleen Yearwood

After the death of her lover, Phillip, a Canadian Native American political activist, ostensibly at the hands of his government, folk artist Kathleen Yearwood produced this CD. The songs are not about rage and loss—they are rage and loss, barely songs at all, more like fragments of a delirium. Ranging in the space of a few bars from striking poetic imagery to factual minutae relating to the case to a grief-stricken incoherence, this is a unique document, the closest contemporay music has come to pure confession. Not the best recording, but that suits the materials. Harrowing.

Bataclan 72, Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico

This live performance has Reed, Cale and Nico in a stripped-down setting, nearly unplugged, alone and together, playing their most haunting material: “Waiting for the Man” / “Berlin” / “Black Angels Death Song” / “Wild Child” / “Heroin” / “Ghost Story” / “The Biggest, Loudest, Hairiest Group Of All” / “Empty Bottles” / “Femme Fatale” / “No One Is There” / “Frozen Warnings” / “Janitor of Lunacy” / “I’ll Be Your Mirror” / “All Tomorrows Parties” / “Pale Blue Eyes” / “Candy Says”. Kind of a nostlagia deal, but wow…

Polyphony, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake

The most interesting and adventurous short fiction market to appear in recent years. Polyphony Three, with wonderful stories by Ford, Dann, et al, gets my vote as the year’s best anthology.

Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer and The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque by Jeff Ford—I offer them not as an entry, but simply to save time, because I have to turn this list in a few minutes from now. I’m sure most who read this list will have read these two marvelous fantasy novels, the VanderMeer more of a fabulist experience, and the Ford a wonderfully mannered vision of 19th century insanity. Nobody can be said to be conversant with the state of contemporary fantasy if they haven’t read these books.

I have to send this off, but in passing I want to mention two other authors to whom I was introduced last year. Iain Sinclair, whose book Downriver, is an unforgettable novel concerning a film crew traveling along the Thames, filming the life along the river; and Cees Noteboom, the Dutch writer whose curious novellas articulate a classic European literary sensibility that stand in the tradition of Tomas Mann and Josef Svorecky.

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Lucius Shepard is a multi-award-winning writer, author of the collections The Jaguar Hunter and The Ends of the Earth. Recent work includes Louisiana Breakdown (Golden Gryphon, 2003) and Floater (PS Publishing, 2003).