Pages tagged “issue 13”

Abbas Kiarostami has always had an experimental streak, but he’s never indulged it as much as he does in his new film, Five, which consists of opening credits and five long shots of nature. That’s it. For each shot, Kiarostami points his video camera at the ocean or a reflection of the moon in a pond, and holds it for 10 to 15 minutes. A few seconds of music open and close each segment, which otherwise sound like water lapping the beach, frogs croaking or thunder in the distance. And each segment, after saying its piece, fades to black or white.

And you know what? It’s a nice piece of work. It’s the kind of movie that succeeds when you’re willing to let your mind wander the way it does when you watch clouds. Maybe you’ll close your eyes and just listen for a bit. Maybe you’ll nod off. I doubt if Kiarostami would object; he even said once that he enjoys movies that are so calm they make you sleepy but give you something to reflect on later.

Of course Five may also raise the ire of would-be hecklers in the audience. The director has some gall to show the beach for 10 minutes! Anyone could do that! This is true, but it doesn’t lessen the worth of spending a few minutes watching the waves. Some folks may think the film is pretentious, but I’m always saddened by the narrow box movies are expected to fit into. When I go to a bookstore I see thousands of books on thousands of subjects written in thousands of different styles, but the movie theater in the very same mall feels like a bookstore where someone has torched everything but the mysteries, sci-fi novels, chick lit, and comic books. Five doesn’t fit into those categories.

The full title of the movie is Five: Five Long Takes Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu, which is confounding since nothing in the popular Japanese filmmaker’s body of work is even remotely like this. Nevertheless, since Kiarostami planted the idea in my head with his opening title, I thought of Ozu as I watched the driftwood sitting on the beach. Gradually, the tide rises enough to nudge the wood, and it breaks into two pieces, the larger of which is carried away by the waves. In Ozu’s Late Spring, a father and daughter are both riding a streetcar when the young woman steps off to go shopping. Ozu chooses to follow the daughter, and so his camera gets off the streetcar with her. Kiarostami chooses the small chunk of wood and stays with it on the beach. But like the father in Late Spring, the large chunk isn’t gone—a few minutes later it comes back into view. Was Kiarostami thinking of Late Spring when he made Five? If he was, one of us is psychic. But the joy of an open-ended movie like this is what you bring to it.

I wouldn’t want Kiarostami to abandon narrative filmmaking forever, but Five is a welcome diversion. You could liken Five to recent albums by Wilco and Radiohead that boldly resist the narrow box of pop music. But where music works through repetition, most movies are seen only once. They get precious few chances to plant something in your head, and I can think of far worse things to stick in your brain than five contemplative shots of nature.

In her fine writer’s manual, The Passionate, Accurate Story, Carol Bly asks whether a link might exist between the lack of reading and a culture’s viciousness. Such a conclusion “sounds neurotic,” she admits, but only if one grants that “it also sounds neurotic to worry about the electromagnetism generated in transformer canisters which stand, two to an alley, in most American cities, causing, it seems, two to three times the incidence of leukemia in children in houses near them.” Ouch.

Writers and readers alike are prone to self-congratulatory—but probably apt—arguments like the above. Here’s another one: Educated Americans don’t read much foreign fiction, while we find ourselves shackled to a proverbial reputation for provincialism. I don’t want to reinforce the old myth of “America stupid/Europe enlightened,” but the minor amount of translated fiction that reaches our notice is a bad sign. So let’s be thankful for publishers who bother to translate foreign literature: works by new authors, by authors unknown outside their home countries and new versions of established classics.

The Book of Proper Names

The Shadow of the Wind

Envy

The Adolescent and The Idiot

Yuri Olesha’s Envy, a classic of early Soviet fiction, is everything Shadow of the Wind is not—brutish, nasty, short and hilarious. The novel’s malcontent narrator passes out at a bar and wakes up in the home of an insufferably virtuous Communist Party apparatchik. The Party man’s grandiosity, small-mindedness and sunny confidence—so like bureaucrats (and Student Council presidents) throughout history—provides Olesha with fodder for a priceless satire on post-revolutionary Russia. Olesha’s genius is to push his narrator beyond satire into a darker, subtler meditation on the heart’s perversity.

Envy harks back to another classic of Russian literature—Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, the first in a series of great novels that occupied the author until his death. Noted translator team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhovonsky have turned out revelatory new versions of both The Idiot (1868) and The Adolescent (1875). The latter, a story of the conflict between a teenager and his illegitimate father, has never seemed so vivid. One can see, in half a page, that Dostoevsky perfectly nailed the combination of insecurity, surliness and wounded, defensive delicacy—often disguised as refinement—that is the voice of late adolescence. As for The Idiot, what can be said? Widely acknowledged one of Dostoevsky’s—and therefore literature’s—greatest moments, it’s an impassioned, chaotic masterpiece in which the unruly wills of a memorable supporting cast beat and roil against the “truly good soul” of epileptic Prince Myshkin. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re lucky; if you have, read it again

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott claims that if you survived childhood, you have more than enough material to write a book. I’m inclined to agree, but memoirs are tricky—which is why many authors don’t bother. I can’t say I blame them. How does one take all those memories—the confusion, insecurity, lust, joy, shame, love—and distill the emotional hodge-podge into something coherent? The task is more than daunting. Why not just box up the past, label it with a Sharpie, and bury it forever in some dark corner of the attic?

In his Harvey Award-winning graphic novel, Blankets, Craig Thompson reminds us that memoirs can provide all the illumination of an archaeological dig. Only when you’ve begun sifting through the dirt, exhuming the bone fragments, can you hope to understand the you who emerged on the other side. Thompson renders his own childhood in vivid black-and-white illustrations. Each frame spills over with clear-eyed wonder and wistful musings on everything from the struggle to hang onto religious faith to the emotional roller-coaster ride of first love.

His masterful illustrations will break your heart, but Thompson’s genius lies in the impressionistic manner in which he realizes them. Midway through the book he recalls an early childhood episode during which he and his brother, while sharing a bed one night, get into a full-fledged pissing match (literally). His mom barges into the room to find out the cause of the ruckus and, furious and confused, hauls the boys into the shower.

Accompanying a frame in which the two brothers stand isolated in pitch darkness with a shower of water raining down like a spotlight high above, Thompson writes, “Either way, one’s first shower is a rite of passage—an initiation into adulthood. Only in this context, it was moreso (sic) a baptism—a vain attempt to cleanse away our shame. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but still I could feel the sin on my body.” Blankets is an unmitigated triumph, but if the idea of crying while reading a comic book doesn’t appeal to you, I’d recommend you leave this one alone.

Amelie Nothomb is a cult figure in Europe but little known stateside. Judging by The Book of Proper Names, her narrative style is oddly sparse—somewhere between fable-like simplicity and screenplay treatment:

“‘Why did you kill your husband?’ ‘The baby in my belly had hiccups.’ … ‘You killed your husband to get rid of your baby’s hiccups?’ She laughed. ‘No, that would be absurd. … He wanted to call it Tanguy if it was a boy and Joelle if it was a girl.’ … She frowned. She felt that her argument lacked a certain something, and yet she was sure she was right. She understood perfectly what she had done, and found it all the more frustrating that she couldn’t explain it. So she decided to say nothing.”

This early scene foreshadows the amoral special treatment that will dominate the life of the unborn daughter, Nothomb’s heroine. It also exemplifies Nothomb’s narrative terseness, which creates a sense of large, unspeakable motives behind the action—at least until we begin to suspect that there’s nothing at work in the life of the heroine but a selfishly indulged romanticism. The book’s abrupt finale suggests that Nothomb herself is so overawed by her self-absorbed main character that she can’t decide how to end the story. But credit the author for not making her novel—at 122 pages, nearly as anorexic as its ballerina heroine—any thicker than her ideas.

In the liner notes to The Comas’ sophomore album, Conductor, lead singer Andy Herod thanks The WB channel. It’s a gracious gesture completely bereft of irony. And to further illustrate his appreciation for the people who brought you Felicity, Herod titles the album’s third cut “Tonight On The WB.” So why is this bearded North Carolinian obsessed with the channel that brought us (yawn) teenage angst? Well, after dating (and being dumped by) Michelle Williams—the not-Katie-Holmes actress from the now-cancelled Dawson’s Creek—for two years, Herod recorded this concept album about the heartbreak and disappointment involved in being taken out to the curb with the recyclables. The result is a pleasant 10-song journey that alternates between dreamy space rock and textbook indie rock. Songs like “Invisible Drugs” and “Employment” are catchy but ultimately wouldn’t wake someone up from a coma. Perhaps Herod should be a bit more selective with his inspirations for the next album. I hear that the daughter from The Gilmore Girls is still available.

David Jacobs-Strain—the young man with the age-old voice and guitar chops that make players twice his age break out in a cold sweat—plows new ground with his latest, Ocean Or A Teardrop. It’s a band record, not a guitar album, and includes the sounds of Arabian ouds and African koras and djembes. Just don’t call it world music. “I’m not sure what the term world music means,” Jacobs-Strain says from the sunny backyard of the big house in Palo Alto where he lives with 11 other Stanford students. “I can’t claim to know how the kora plays into the origins of the blues, but the [kora and guitar] have a similar language and I’m excited to bring together sounds that work together and are pleasing to the ear.”

With producer Kenny Passarelli (Otis Taylor, Elton John) Jacobs-Strain assembled a cast of like-minded musicians to honor the music’s deep roots while letting it grow. “It’s not all live, but it’s all spontaneous,” Jacobs-Strain says. “I’d play the songs [for the musicians] and an hour later we were recording. We could have made a more produced record, but I like music with a loose feel. It’s the most fun I’ve had since I discovered bottleneck guitar.”

Which begs the obvious question: how did a kid from Eugene, Ore., become a blues guitar hero? “I grew up going to folk festivals where hand music thrived. The blues had a big, wide-open landscape; its freedom and wild romance appealed to me and still does. I stay true to the tradition, even though I’m not from the tradition.”

Miles completists will covet this massive 7-CD box set because, at long last, it fully captures the evolution from his first great late-’50s quintet featuring John Coltrane and Bill Evans to his second great mid-to-late-’60s quintet featuring Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. With 47 sprawling studio and live tracks (eight of them previously unissued), the correct chronological sequencing of the material and a 92-page booklet lovingly detailing every session, this set (like the others in Columbia’s Miles reissue series) sets the standard for comprehensiveness and packaging, and it chronicles an oft-neglected, startlingly creative phase of Miles’ career. More casual fans will simply revel in the interplay of the revolving cast of musicians, as Miles successfully makes musical history—again. In 18 short months, he took his music in a completely new direction. It wouldn’t be the last time, but the genius of Miles Davis shines through in every blue note.

Pop music has offered its fans precious few certainties over the years, but the Hollywood-starlet-gone-pop-star storyline almost always ends with the exact same face-reddening pop. But what if your singing career predates your Oscar nomination? British-born actress Minnie Driver, best known for her work in 1997’s Good Will Hunting, has finally released her debut album, nearly a decade after signing with Island Records. Naysayers may snort in disbelief, but Everything I’ve Got In My Pocket is a shockingly competent collection of sweet, ethereal dream-pop that feels distinctly homemade (Driver is responsible for all the music and lyrics on Pocket, save a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”). Driver’s gently cooed invitations (think Beth Orton and Sarah McLachlan) are undeniably charming, and Everything I’ve Got In My Pocket is just compelling enough to successfully upset decades of sad, singing-actress tradition.

As a member of the progressive bluegrass outfit Nickel Creek, Chris Thile helped win the band remarkable crossover success. Mutual Admiration Society — a recent side project with Toad The Wet Sprocket’s Glen Philips — found Thile dabbling further in rock ’n’ roll. For his latest solo effort, he steps up to the mic, offering songs cast in an ambitious array of styles, while lyrically exploring insecurity, faith and heartache. Aside from two instrumentals (the melancholic “Waltz For Dewayne Pomeroy” and the freewheeling “Jessamyn’s Reel”), Thile sings throughout, venturing into guitar-driven rock on “Empire Falls” and moody chamber pop on “This Is All Real.” The quirky meter and blank verse of “The Wrong Idea” underscores the song’s conflicting emotional loyalties, further emphasized by a shift from string-laden dolor to impassioned power chords. “On Ice” is a particular standout, with a snaking mandolin figure that steadily tumbles toward the singer’s doubtful assertion of “I feel fine!” While he occasionally strays into self-conscious posing (the awkward, jazzy stutter-time of “Locking Doors”), the album remains surprisingly cohesive, considering its stylistic ambition.

Longtime Paste readers may have noticed my Buffy obsession. The Buffyverse stands as the primary source of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” quotes, and my interview in Issue #2 with co-executive producer Marti Noxon (and the opportunity to extol for thinking adults the virtues of Buffy and its spinoff Angel) remains the highlight of my career. While it’s tempting to proselytize again, I’ll merely point the uninitiated and unbelieving to said article-and encourage you to follow it with similar tomes from Salon.com, The New York Times and The Door. In the meantime, I’ll reminisce for the flock.

In the seventh and final season, the Scoobies battle the first and ultimate evil (known simply as The First), who sees an opportunity to end the entire line of slayers and triumph over good once and for all. In the midst of this war, each of them struggles with grief, guilt, redemption, forgiveness, purpose and, especially, power.

On initial viewing, season seven felt perfectly satisfactory, but not excellent. The impending doom loomed larger than in previously averted apocalypses, dampening the group’s normal wit and humor. Even in the tortured-soul dourness of season six, there were many moments of levity. Rather than a series of standalone episodes, featuring a monster du jour atop subtler season/series story arcs, the final season’s installments revolved around the buildup to the final showdown. While not lacking in outstanding episodes, the pace was something new to fans and seemed to sap energy from the show. However, viewed in more rapid succession, the season acquires new life and comes across as the extended epic that it is. As for the bonus features on the season’s DVDs, the outtakes are lame and the commentaries are a mixed bag. The remainder—from the season overview to (my favorite) “Buffy 101: Studying the Slayer”—are lovingly crafted and worth the effort.

So where does season seven fall in the canon? Season six remains the highlight. You won’t find a more skilled extended exploration of existential turmoil on the big or small screen. And I’m not talking “woe is me” teenage angst, but a genuine search for what it means to be human. It’s Bergman for the masses. The more accessible seasons two and three follow next, with their Wagnerian sweep and intensity. The season two finale, a treatise on the power of drama, will leave you shaken. Next, solidly in the middle, lies the final season, followed by seasons five (“The Body” is one of television’s finest examples of subtly and emotional realism), one and four (“Hush” alone makes this season worth owning).

Seven—a number significant for syndication and in Judeo-Christian numerology. And after seven wonderful (though not perfect) years, Joss Whedon and crew take a well-deserved rest. Fortunately, those of us left behind can watch these DVDs in remembrance.

“It’s happened like, three times over the last couple years,” says R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe. “I’m sitting in a café or a restaurant somewhere, and I’ll hear a song that sounds familiar and I’ll go, ‘God, that is so great. What is it?’ And over the din, the glorious din of a roomful of people yammering, I’ll find out … Jesus! It’s something I recorded when I was 21 years old.”

Stipe is conducting interviews from his dressing room in Philadelphia’s Wachovia Center, where R.E.M. is rehearsing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for the opening night of MoveOn.org’s six-city Vote for Change tour. The band has set up camp for several days as members do press for their 13th studio release, Around the Sun.

As is expected of a band of R.E.M.’s stature, the press junket is frenetic and haphazard. Interview times get bumped as media crews are shu­ed from room to room of the historic Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia. Reporters get 15 minutes with each member of the band, no matter how big or small the publication … at least, that’s what they tell us. Band members answer their questions graciously and professionally. All in all, it’s a far, frenzied cry from the band’s languid genesis in Athens, Ga.

Talk About the Passion
“All of us loved music,” Stipe says of those early days. “We all knew what it was to have a song on a record forever and ever. You couldn’t go back and change it if you don’t like it. And that led me into this kind of phase for our first couple records where the idea of creating something timeless was really important to me. The idea that 20, 50 years later, someone could hear one of these songs and it would have this very present quality to it.”

R.E.M.’s early catalogue has endured, largely because of its warm, personal feel—like a handmade sweater or a cup of homemade soup. From the start, expressions of genuine concern like “So. Central Rain” and good advice like “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” held an intimate place in the kudzu-wrapped hearts of music lovers who appreciated the band’s homespun approach to its craft—an approach both direct and oblique, masterful and naïve. In its infancy, R.E.M. was a refreshing break from the polished, arena-rock excess of groups like Journey and the contrived quirkiness of the New Romantic bands being shipped over from England.

“I didn’t like the way everything was so linear and literal in the world,” says guitarist Peter Buck. “It was the New Wave era, so every record you’d buy had four or five guys wearing wacky glasses and red shirts with zippers on them. We were a lot artier than your average rock band, so we wanted something that was more reflective of who we were, you know? Like this Southern vine that grows around this abandoned train trestle. That said more about us than a picture of us in our new clothes would.”

Maps and Legends
Although R.E.M. was very much a product of its environment, the band seemingly created art in a vacuum. By eschewing trends and outside influences, it made Southern America seem suddenly exotic, even to their countrymen. Hailing from a region previously known mostly for red clay and rednecks, they were refreshingly literate and eccentric—a lead singer who claimed he could predict earthquakes, a bass player who supposedly could smell ants, and a guitarist who shared his audience’s undying faith in the redemptive power of rock ’n’ roll. Dealing in jangly rhythms and whispered impressions, R.E.M. truly was the stuff of dreams.

Growing up listening to tracks like “Camera” and “Perfect Circle,” I became utterly convinced Stipe was capable of channeling random thoughts from the spirits of those long departed—a conviction born out by his haunting performance of “Swan Swan H” in the movie Athens, Ga. Inside/Out [see the Paste DVD sampler]. In an abandoned Southern Gothic church, Stipe transformed his angelic 26-year-old frame into that of a twittering Civil War veteran with the weight of a new century on his shoulders. That musicians of such artistic accomplishment could walk the streets of their sleepy college town as ordinary citizens added significantly to their mystique.

“I used to collapse poetically on a couch at the end of a record with my hand on my forehead and say, ‘I’ll never be able to do this again,’” Stipe says of the process that resulted in those early recordings. “I just completely drained myself. I put everything I had into not only writing the stuff but the process of recording and mixing and making the decisions you need to make to get it on a record.”

It was hard work, but R.E.M. was on a roll. In interview after interview and with each new release, the band forged a new kind of contract with its fans—one that showed it was uniquely aware of its own mythology and that it would work hard to preserve that which made R.E.M. special. Band members swore they would never lip-sync their music videos. They swore they would never play venues with more than 10,000 seats. Most famously, they prophesied a break up on New Year’s Eve, 1999, with their integrity intact.

Letter Never Sent
The most controversial renegotiation of R.E.M.’s unspoken contract was the decision to stick together when drummer Bill Berry left in 1997 following the aneurysm he experienced during the band’s ill-fated Monster tour. “He doesn’t leave his house,” Buck says of Berry now. “Lucky enough, he’s got like an 80-acre place, so you know, he pretty much just putters around there. Once a week he goes to a grocery store. He’s doing great, but he couldn’t do this. He wouldn’t want to do any of this.”

As an expression of the quartet’s solidarity, R.E.M.’s members always said they would cease to be a band if a member ever decided to quit. Berry left as the ink was drying on the band’s record-breaking $80 million contract with Warner Brothers. New Adventures in Hi-Fi was the first album released under this new contract and the last album on which Berry appeared; it also became the first R.E.M. release to sell fewer copies than its predecessor.

“Bill leaving the band was a horrible blow, but it’s only … it’s not bad when you put it in perspective, because he could have died,” says bassist Mike Mills. “As it is now, the band changed. OK, I can live with that. Bill’s still out there. I can call him when I want to, and to me, that makes everything else kind of inconsequential. But of course, it did sort of yank the rug out from under the band, and it forced us to reconsider many things, including our commitment to each other, our commitment to the band and how the hell we were going to continue as a three-piece.”

Frustrations relating to Berry’s departure and the struggle to find a new direction came to a head while the band was recording Up. Stipe and Mills would show up late for recording sessions, frustrating Buck, who was used to using downtime to work out ideas with Berry. “I was really pissed off about the way things were going,” Buck says “I didn’t feel like the other guys were focusing at all, and I think I was right in that regard.” He called an emergency meeting and they all retreated to Idaho where they spent a week hashing out their problems with the help of a facilitator.

“If you stay together long enough, you have to periodically recommit yourself to what you’re doing and make sure the lines of communication are still open,” Mills says. “That’s what happens to any group of people, no matter what the endeavor is, whether it’s business or social. The lines of communication often close down and that’s what happened to us. We weren’t really talking to each other like we should have been, and we all realized the need for either recommitment to what we were doing or to stop doing it.”

Crush With Eyeliner
Mills told me the band would be “pulling out their heavy guns” for a set with Bruce Springsteen tonight, and the show begins just as predicted, with a crunching rendition of “The One I Love” followed by an equally powerful “Begin the Begin.” Stipe & Co. then launch into a string of songs—“Leaving New York,” “She Just Wants to Be,” “Animal” and “Walk Unafraid”—in which the audience has little or no emotional investment. Judging from their reactions, the 30-somethings dominating the crowd would rather hear songs that were important to them when they were growing up. R.E.M. has never been better live, but gets only a smattering of applause for the newer songs.

Springsteen, by contrast, begins his set with the oldest, most emotionally charged song of the evening—“The Star-Spangled Banner.” Under a lone spotlight, he hunches his body over his 12-string acoustic guitar as if trying desperately to coax out notes that once united a nation. The Vote for Change audience is reminded instantly why it came tonight. Not far from the stadium is Valley Forge, where General George Washington spent the cold winter of 1778 as the British laid siege to Philadelphia. Further west are the fields of Gettysburg where, over a period of three days in the hot summer of 1863, more than 20,000 men lost their lives reshaping the terms of freedom the Founding Fathers had so eloquently put forth. The small city hall where those terms were debated stands less than five miles from where Bruce Springsteen is performing tonight.

“We remain a land of great promise, but I think we need to move America toward the fulfillment of the promise that she’s made for her citizens,” he says during a break towards the end of the show. “Economic justice. Civil rights. The protection of the environment. A living wage. Respect for others and humility in exercising our power at home and around the world. These are not impossible ideals; they are achievable goals with strong leadership and the will of a vigilant and informed American people.” He then calls a beaming Mike Mills and Peter Buck to the stage to back him on a blistering version of “Born to Run.” “Someday girl, I don’t know when,” he sings, the timeless words rocking the audience to a frenzy—“We’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun, but ’til then tramps like us, baby we were born to run!”

Rock ’n’ roll is capable of divining the truth, and Springsteen has just nailed it.

If Springsteen is the quintessential American singer—John Steinbeck’s soul wrapped in Elvis Presley’s spirit—then R.E.M. is the quintessential American band. Optimistic, entrepreneurial, once humble but now increasingly brash with confidence. The truth Springsteen has spoken so plainly for more than 30 years, R.E.M. once achieved with a mumble. As Stipe snakes across the stage—a delight to watch in his new white suit and commanding stage presence—I wonder if he could ever return to the dream state that inspired some of the band’s most intimate work. He’s a rock star now. A frontman. A product of pop culture.

“I’m the least confident person you’ll probably ever see tour in your life,” Stipe laughs, suggesting his stage presence may be a way to protect a sacred, intimate part of his soul from the glaring spotlights overhead. “No matter what anybody thinks of what we do, to me it is what it is. I recognize its shortcomings and I recognize it for what it is.”

Around the Sun
For me a record is a sea of possibilities,” says Buck. “When you start it out, it could be anything. Then the possibilities start disappearing and it becomes the record you buy.” The album’s not even out yet, and the critic in him is already deconstructing and reconstructing the album in countless possible ways. “My record would be, believe it or not, even slower and more acoustic,” he says, citing “On the Fly,” a slow song he considers among the five best R.E.M. has ever recorded but, nevertheless, is not appearing on the new album, Around the Sun.

“I like records that kind of hold a mood,” he continues. “No one’s ever said, ‘Gosh, that Nick Drake record Five Leaves Left doesn’t really have a rocker.’ That’s not the way I look at that kind of stuff, so I would have probably gone slower. I think Michael would have had a couple faster ones and Mike, I think he got pretty close to what he wanted, but I think we all did.” He then lists songs he would’ve taken off, including “Aftermath” and the soulful “Ascent of Man.”

To Stipe, Around the Sun represents the start of an incredibly prolific period. “It felt to me like every time I went to write a song I had all our greatest songs sitting on my shoulder,” he says. “But about a-year-and-a-half-ago, Bono gave me some very sage advice. ‘Every song doesn’t have to be great, just do what we do,’ he said. ‘We’re songwriters. Let’s write songs.’ And it unlatched a lock in my brain or something. I realized I can write a mediocre song. It doesn’t have to be heard by the public or even Mike and Peter. That set me off on what’s turned into the most prolific period I’ve ever experienced as a songwriter.”

Bono’s advice, leaked to the press, led to rampant speculation that Around the Sun was going to be R.E.M.’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind—a record that found U2 returning to its Joshua Tree-era roots to the delight of longtime fans. It’s speculation that Mike Mills dismisses outright. “I don’t compare any of our records to U2’s,” he says. “I love those guys, I love the work they do and I’m proud to be mentioned in the same breath as them as often as we are, but we don’t have the same goals they do. They aim big. I think we aim smaller. They wanted to make a rock record and we weren’t after that at this point. These are the songs we had, and they seemed to fit on this record.”

Shiny Happy People
R.E.M.’s official Around the Sun listening party is happening in downtown Athens at Little Kings Bar, a place so new, it’s better known locally as “that place where Pylon played their reunion show a few months back.” Tickets are $20 at the door with all proceeds going toward local family- and school-based charities. The band members are not in attendance.

Folding chairs and tables are set up in the bar’s adjoining parking lot. R.E.M. staffers, kids from the Communities in Schools program and local bankers and lawyers make up a business-casual audience who will later bid on signed R.E.M. memorabilia. An out-of-commission London city bus is currently serving as a stage for Calvin Smith, who is performing a medley of R.E.M.’s biggest hits to the accompaniment of a single electric guitar. Looking like a Nubian king with his broached turban and campy stage presence, Smith is a throwback to R.E.M.’s irreverent early days.

Around the Sun has been streaming for about a week on MySpace.com, but this listening party is being billed as a sneak peek at the new album. Very few college kids are in attendance. Occasionally a car slows down to check out images from R.E.M.’s latest concert DVD as they are broadcast on the side of the building. I start several interviews with people I think are fans before learning that they’re in some way associated with the band—employees, nannies, sons or daughters of business associates.

The fans I do talk to each reveal a different interpretation of what R.E.M. represents and where the band should be going. There’s the college girl who compares them to Maroon 5 and is shocked when I say I don’t know who Maroon 5 is. “They’re like Three Doors Down,” she says. There’s the 26-year-old woman who says their best album is Up; her 23-year-old boyfriend shakes his head and says it’s Murmur. There’s the guy who says a lot of people have been “down” on “Leaving New York” but he likes it, and the hard-core indie rocker who says she was turned on to the band when she heard “Shiny Happy People” when she was 12. Most listen politely to Around the Sun and decline to comment when I ask what they think, saying they really haven’t formed an opinion yet. One fan, who identifies herself as a regular poster on the murmurs.com fan website says the new album is much quieter than she was hoping for. “If they continue with stuff like Reveal, I’m not sure if I would be crushed if they just stopped making music.” This is a hard conclusion to come to, and she almost can’t believe she’s saying it. “If they went back to the energy of their earlier albums, I think I’d come back.”

Imitation of Life
“You can’t even think about that, and we don’t,” says Mills when I ask him how R.E.M. accommodates such a wide audience base-people for whom R.E.M. means Murmur vs. people for whom R.E.M. means Monster vs. people for whom R.E.M. means Reveal. “There are three people that we try to please,” says Mills, “and that’s myself, Peter and Michael. Four if you count the producer, Pat McCarthy. You attract fans by being honest and doing what you do,” he continues. “As we went on, I think we built up a fan base of people who appreciated what we did and why we did it. Then, when you start having hit singles you begin to attract the casual listener—people who don’t really seek out music, but they like what they hear on the radio and they’ll go buy the record. And if you don’t have hit singles, you lose the casual listener and move back to a core of people who actively seek out music and find what they like. That’s fine. That’s a natural progression of things. We like creating little worlds for people and we hope they enjoy inhabiting them with us when we do.”

R.E.M. has been creating these little worlds for almost 25 years. The band has given a lot to its fans and has created some of the most important work of its generation. When I tell Stipe I’m naturally drawn to the older albums, he understands. “Sure. Music speaks to you at the time you hear it,” he says. “I have records like that in my life, too.”

Stipe’s comment brings to mind a question I’ve been dying to ask Peter since I read years ago that he thought R.E.M. was destined to make one of the 10 best albums in the history of rock ’n’ roll. Have they done it yet? If not, are they still trying? And which records come closest to that goal?

“It’s hard for me to know because I see the joints,” he says. “I see the Frankenstein monster aspects of the songs. The bridge isn’t as good as it should be; the mix isn’t what I wanted it to be; I don’t like the third line in the second verse—all of that stuff. You grow up as a teenager and think this music is made by gods. Even though they’re only human, I still tend to think of the The Beach Boys ’66, Dylan in the ’60s, The Beatles, James Brown and The Velvet Underground as untouchable.”

He pauses for a moment before continuing. “Our stuff stands up pretty well in the era that we’re in, you know … but are they the best records of all time? I wouldn’t claim that even if I thought it was true.”

The Zuton’s frontman David McCabe often tootles song melodies on his instrument of choice, the melodica. These tones are usually accompanied by bracing blasts from his second-in-command, saxophonist Abi Harding. For a while, the band adorned itself in the kitschy retro wear of filmdom, circa the pre-talkie, black-and-white era, with McCabe sporting a cape, handlebar moustache and Dr. Caligari-ish top hat. The band’s lyrics reference classic sci-fi and horror flicks, while the music rides choppy R&B waves sur½ng straight out of the Stateside ’60s. So just who—or what, exactly—are Liverpool’s zany Zutons?

Well, they were named for an old Captain Beefheart lyric, allows McCabe over a bleary-eyed breakfast. The first song on the group’s oddly self-deprecating debut, Who Killed The Zutons?, promises to give listeners “Zuton Fever.” Which is

McCabe shrugs. “We don’t know whatever ‘art school’ movement is kicking off in Britain at the moment, because we’re not art school,” he swears in a rather quirky confession. “I’m just a simple musician who couldn’t get a job that I liked for a few years, so luckily I got a record deal instead. … I think there are definitely a few more albums in us, albums that people will either really love or really hate. There won’t be any easy middle ground.”

It’s been a banner year for documentaries. Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s explosive exposé on the Bush administration became the highest-grossing documentary of all time. Fahrenheit 9/11 is riding a crest of political unrest.

“Go back to the late ’60s early ’70s where people were finding that the mass media wasn’t really expressing their frustration over how politics and policy was being handled,” says Steve Savage, whose company Docurama.com hosts the only website dedicated exclusively to distributing documentaries on DVD. Think of it as the Amazon.com of non-fiction film. “Music was actually the medium that was able to capture the anger and the aspirations of those times. We’re thinking that documentary films are finding that same road now.”

If ’60s activism inspired the golden age of rock ’n’ roll, Savage claims we may now be in the golden age of documentary film. “When we founded Docurama in 1999, we were seeing that nonfiction had overtaken fiction in bookstores as the largest selling category,” he says. “People were looking for new ways to learn about their world.”

Fear, dissent and dissatisfaction, it turns out, have been great for business. They’ve kept op-ed pages gridlocked nationwide and have driven record numbers to the polls. They’ve also filled seats at movie theaters for a slew of sleeper hits—Bush’s Brain, Outfoxed, Supersize Me. “This year, documentaries became a subgenre, just like ‘comedy’ or ‘action film’,” Savage says. “The political documentary has had tremendous explosion, but there are also personal docs, music docs and sports docs that are amazingly well envisioned.”

Sarah Price, who produced the 1997 cult favorite American Movie with Chris Smith agrees. “I think Michael Moore really helped open the door to larger distribution for the documentary,” she says. Her current film with Smith, The Yes Men, follows the antics of two anti-World Trade Organization pranksters. “Obviously with the current state of affairs people are ready to accept political and social documentary. That will probably wane as soon as our politics start to ebb and flow.”

Anything could happen. Savage notes that Michael Moore has been making successful political films since 1989’s Roger & Me, but he acknowledges that the political film may have temporarily overshadowed other types of documentaries. As an worthy example of these other types, he cites one of his personal favorites, Rivers and Tides (granted, it is one of his company’s releases). “It’s a reflective film about an artist who makes beautiful sculptures out of driftwood that are destroyed with the tide at the end of each day,” he says.

Whether the current batch of political documentaries actually have had an effect on the larger culture has yet to be seen. “The whole piece is an expression of opinion,” says Mark Achbar, of his film, The Corporation, which takes a critical look at the growing prominence of corporations in our society. “When you make films like mine, you hope it shifts the culture a little bit. You hope it opens a discussion on the problems we all face."

In 1973, influential filmmaker Jean Rouch wryly explained why he made documentaries about vanishing cultures: “Why do I take the camera among mankind? My first response will always, strangely, be the same: ‘For me.’” Trained as an anthropologist, Rouch had more reasons than that, but his statement was honest and philosophical. “Film,” he added, “is the only means I have to show someone else how I see him.” In the 1950s his embrace of new technology—portable cameras and audio equipment—helped Rouch stand on the shoulders of Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and Dziga Vertov (The Man with the Movie Camera), innovators who recognized in cinema’s earliest days that a camera can break down barriers between people, a little machine capturing bits of truth.

Born in Houston, a year before Rouch made this statement, Jonathan Caouette grew up with a camera at his side, and he clung to it like a security blanket through his family’s dark nights. Tarnation, the 90-minute film he extracted from two decades of footage, attempts to untangle his complicated past, reaching for the elusive truth. It’s his own story—he was a troubled child with abusive foster parents, a boy who made slasher movies with his friends and partied at adult clubs when he was a teen—but it’s also the story of his mother and her mental illness, and the story of his grandparents who raised him during his mother’s extended hospital stays. Caouette seems like he’s coming up for air after a long, breathless struggle; Tarnation is his testament of survival.

The promise of personal video is that it’ll put the power of moving images into the hands—and homes—of ordinary people. It’s another frontier opened by technology, a place cameras have, until now, been too bulky or foreign to go unnoticed. Albert Brooks poked fun at the attempts to film domestic spaces in his hilarious first movie, Real Life, where men with cameras mounted on their heads lurk around Charles Grodin’s dinner table as he tries to carry on a “normal” conversation with his family. But, since then, cameras have become as familiar as lampshades in many American homes. And for kids like Jonathan, the camera is now a substitute for a leather-bound diary, trusty and worn, a keeper of secrets.

Although Tarnation foreshadows a new era of personal filmmaking, it doesn’t necessarily herald the coming of a great filmmaker. Caouette’s 90 minutes are a jumbled mass of images, aligned in arbitrary grids and edited with little grace. Maybe the high-volume, monotonous pace mirrors Caouette’s inability to order his life and his tendency toward melodrama, but his movie would benefit from a keener, more curious eye. Instead of using the grammar of cinema to tell his story, he relies on pages of scrolling text that read like the piteous scribbles of a teenager holed up in his room with the stereo blasting.

Granted, young Jonathan had plenty to be woeful about, but the movie is best when it slips quietly into the pockets between his family’s dramatic episodes, showing Caouette’s natural, spooky talent for acting in the process. A monologue he delivers when he’s 12 years old—playing the part of a battered housewife—is as riveting as it is disturbing. He’s acting for an audience of one, his camera, and although it’s not the kind of scene that would be the heart of most movies, it’s the heart of this one. At that moment Tarnation is tensely electric—on the verge of fulfilling its promise by tapping into an unexplored vein of human experience.

But today’s Caouette is at the mercy of his flair for drama, as he eventually abandons intimacy, catering instead to a new audience raised on ambush journalism and televised domestic disputes. When he confronts his family or puts them in awkward situations for the sake of a scene, the movie feels simply conventional. It’s no longer “for me” or even “for us” but all too eager to evoke pity in an unseen third party; it’s “for you,” the audience, who expects an emotional rollercoaster.

The video revolution may indeed be televised, and the truth may be streamed at so many bits per second, but technology alone won’t be enough. It’ll require filmmakers sensitive to the needs of images so intimate they can either crush or be crushed, so tenuously powerful they’re devastating only until someone tries to make them more so. Caouette’s life is filled with extraordinary experiences, but extraordinary experiences are nothing new to film. The ordinary ones, the ones the tiny, ubiquitous cameras have the greatest potential to reveal, remain, for the time being, fleeting.

In the interview portion of Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Aimee Mann sums up her primary songwriting inspiration: “I just think people’s problems are fascinating … there are just a million different ways people can go horribly wrong—the whole thing is just so terrific.” While the notion of delighting in charting others’ dysfunction suggests a sort of meta-dysfunction, it’s provided a stream of beautiful, incisive pop gems for Mann, including “Wise Up” and “Save Me” (the Magnolia soundtrack’s crown jewels). While hardly a revelation musically—each song is rendered in about the manner you’d hear it on record—this 2004 performance offers an enjoyable glimpse of the congenial woman behind some of your favorite wan, doomed-relationship ditties.

Nancy Sinatra got little respect from her own generation, but this eponymous album is a much-deserved lovefest from a new generation: Thurston Moore (a bust), Morrissey (another bust), Jon Spencer, Pete Yorn (the surprisingly good “Don’t Mean Nothin’”), Calexico, Jarvis Cocker (the glorious “Baby’s Coming Back to Me”) and U2. She’s still got class and sass to spare, but among so many collaborators, Sinatra sounds too malleable and impersonal.

Short, with graying hair and an athletic build, Tom Perrotta enters a Starbucks in Belmont, the Boston suburb where he makes his home. He’s smiling amiably behind his glasses, the picture of contentment—and with good reason. His latest novel, Little Children (available in paperback this January), has been the most critically acclaimed of his career, grabbing the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The book will likely appear on many “year’s best” lists, and has landed him a job writing a screenplay version with Todd Field of In the Bedroom. At a recent reading, Perrotta was treated like a rock star, approaching the stage to a cheering club audience after a performance by Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz.

“It was the kind of thing where one bad review could just have cooled [everything],” he says. “Instead everything was just one thing after another after another—one thing better than the next. It was just that experience of a book kind of breaking through to the right audience that I’d never had before.”

Perrotta is apparently living the suburban American dream with his wife and two children—happy, successful and content. In other words, everything the characters in his novels aren’t. He laughs as he considers this. “I think there are, of course, happy and satisfied people in the world,” he says. “It’s hard for a novelist to know what to do with them.”

Instead, he frequently writes about bored or restless suburbanites trying to break out of a rut, often through infidelity. Dave, a wedding musician in suburban New Jersey, proposes to his longtime girlfriend on a whim in The Wishbones. In Little Children, Todd and Sarah escape the drudgery of babysitting at the playground in Bellington, a Boston suburb. “I think a lot of my characters are people who feel like they drifted into their lives, and infidelity seems like a good vehicle, or [they] put themselves in a position where they can exercise a choice,” Perrotta says. “Especially if they’ve drifted into a marriage.”

More often than not, Perrotta’s characters can act in an obviously right or wrong way, and his audiences at readings tend to point that out to him. Recently, a woman saw fit to tell Perrotta how Todd from Little Children could have avoided his affair by explaining his feelings to his wife. “And I thought, that’s like the death of the novel—the self-aware character,” he says, laughing. “And I think even people who think of themselves as extremely self-aware, on some level have illusions about themselves. The novelist needs the character to have illusions in some sense.”

Perrotta does share one thing with his characters: a suburban address. And though you could drive 20 minutes in any direction from this Starbucks and recognize the area Perrotta describes in Children, only a few details are drawn from Belmont and a nearby neighborhood, Arlington. “I was surprised to the degree people would say, ‘Oh, that’s Belmont!’ or ‘That’s my town!’ because there’s not a whole lot of detail,” Perrotta says. “It struck me in a way that so much of suburbia is generic that it takes very little to kind of evoke it for people.”

This Anytown backdrop is practically a chief antagonist. Perrotta’s suburbs are both familiar and challenging, depressing and comforting. In the stifling suburbs, any forward momentum a character could muster stands out—and Perrotta enjoys playing with that friction. “In Little Children I thought, ‘there’s something so sexless and boring from an adult standpoint about the world of the playground, but if I can make that sexy, that would be an accomplishment,’” he says. “So I’m often drawn to the microcosm and drawn to the banal, trying to somehow charge that up.”

Children has been called satirical as a means of praising it, a characterization with which Perrotta disagrees. Satire was fine for the movie adaptation of his novel Election, in which the characters were exaggerated for effect. But in his books, Perrotta sees satire as an obstacle to a psychologically realistic narrative. “As a writer, I’m always trying to control and suppress it, make the characters real,” he says. “It’s like the satire’s pressing against the reality.”

As for the connection between the reality of his own life in the Boston suburbs and that of his characters’ lives, that’s mostly—though not entirely—coincidental. Finding Perrotta in his own work is not as simple as noting the similarities between Belmont and the fictional version of Bellington. His last novel, Joe College, was somewhat autobiographical. “I was writing very explicitly about something that happened to me, but I changed tons of stuff,” he says of College. “Whereas, in Election and Little Children, which I think of much more as kind of public novels and not autobiographical novels, I end up donating little bits of myself to this character and that character. I’m much more spread out through it.”

The title Terri Hendrix chose for her new album, The Art of Removing Wallpaper, is obviously a metaphor—one that becomes clear in the last verse of its opening song, “Breakdown”: “Now you can cover it up with wallpaper / Cover it up with paint or / Hang a masterpiece on the wall / Sooner or later the day’s gonna come when you have to face / What’s underneath it all.”

Sometimes that’s a much harder process than home improvement but, ultimately, even more rewarding, as the Texas resident learned while writing songs for her seventh album. With impeccable musicianship, Hendrix delivers 11 tracks of wit and wisdom (plus one instrumental) that again raise questions about why she’s still paying dues in the Terminally Underappreciated Club, membership she shares with similarly inclined artists Amy Rigby and Christine Lavin.

But that may change with Wallpaper. Her recognition factor has grown since co-writing “Lil’ Jack Slade,” a Grammy-winning instrumental on the Dixie Chicks’ Home. Her Chicks connection is Lloyd Maines, Natalie’s dad and Hendrix’s longtime co-producer and songwriting/performing partner.

“Lloyd’s really fun to travel with,” Hendrix says. “We have a lot of crazy moments. I can’t read a Yahoo map backward to save my life.”

She might not be able to navigate back to where she started, but that’s OK. The point—career-wise and personally—is to move forward.