Pages tagged “issue 27”

A captain’s logbook from a sailing trip John Lennon took in 1980 might have some people wondering what the former Beatle was doing in the middle of the Atlantic sailing in a 43-foot schooner with four strangers and a mysterious figure known only as “Captain Hank.” The answer? Shaking off a five-year bout of writer’s block.

The book—which surfaced at a recent auction held by London rock-memorabilia house Cooper Owen—is signed by several sailors and guests of the vessel Megan Jaye and includes notes and doodles made by Lennon during the stormy 600-mile voyage from Rhode Island to Bermuda in June 1980. “Dear Megan,” reads one inscription, “There is no place like nowhere. And thanks Hank. Love, John.” Along with his notes, Lennon drew a picture of himself with a beard, sailing the Megan Jaye through the Bermuda Triangle. The book also contains other entries and anecdotes that touch upon the importance of this Bermuda trip, which is credited with lifting the Beatle out of depression and inspiring him to begin writing his last album, Double Fantasy. Lennon, rock historians say, considered the Bermuda trip one of the most important events of his life.

“He had not been inspired like that since 1961 when he was starting off with The Beatles,” says Tom Fontaine, owner of the Megan Jaye logbook, who also worked on the recent film The U.S. vs. John Lennon (see Paste #24). “The experience gave him the confidence in himself to go back and write his final works. It’s an important piece and I want it to go to the right person.”

While the logbook was withdrawn from the Cooper Owen auction because it failed to meet the reserve, people will get a chance to view it (and even buy it) Dec. 9 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas at a charity auction for the TJ Martel Foundation. (Some experts estimate it will be auctioned for as much as $43,000. Fontaine estimates it at $35,000. It was last sold for more than $8,000).

‘SEA LEGS’
According to the Cooper Owen auction catalog, the sail from Newport, R.I., to Hamilton, Bermuda, was an epic voyage for Lennon. On day three, the Megan Jaye ran into rough weather and, one by one, the crew fell ill from pitching seas. Lennon, after 15 minutes at the wheel in his foul-weather gear, began to get his sea legs. He said the feeling was just like going on stage. “At first you panic and then you’re ready to throw up your guts,” Lennon recalled in a Playboy interview after his trip. “But once you got out there and start doing all the stuff, you forget your fears and you got high on your performance.

“So there I was at the wheel with the wind and sea lashing out at me. At first I was terrified, but Captain Hank was at my side so I felt relatively safe because I knew he wouldn’t let me do anything stupid. After a while Captain Hank wasn’t feeling too well so he went to the cabin below.

“Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience and I started to shout out old sea shanties in the face of the storm, screaming at the thundering sky.” Lennon also compared the experience to when The Beatles were at their peak, saying he felt “centered” and “in tune with the cosmos.”

Tyler Coneys was a member of the crew, which included his cousins Kevin and Ellen and Captain Hank. Earlier that spring, Lennon, 39 at the time, had purchased a 14-foot sailboat from Coneys Marine in Huntington, N.Y. (“It was a ‘wet-ass’ boat,” says Coneys. “Not the kind you buy when you just start sailing at 40.”)

Coneys says the Atlantic crossing was Lennon’s longtime dream. “When guys turn 40 some buy a sports car or a motorcycle. Well, Lennon wanted this experience. They say life begins at 40. And this is what he wanted.”

If Coneys had any doubt of Lennon’s grit and toughness, it was washed away during the gale. “It was a huge storm and everyone thought we might die,” says Coneys. “We were in the middle of it and the waves looked like the size of buildings. He could have been watching TV but instead he decided to be there by choice. Right there in it. It was the perfect situation, I guess. All your life you dream about an adventure. You can’t make something like that happen.”

On the boat, Coneys said Lennon had no superstar pretense and fulfilled his ship duties like the rest of the crew. “He was really just one of the guys,” Coneys says. “But he came through. It was right in the heart of the worst part of the storm and he stepped up.”

NEW WIND FOR THE SAILS
With the cathartic six-day journey behind him, Lennon arrived on the island June 11 relaxed, re-energized and inspired. He stayed for two months—writing, recording and staying up all night working on his new songs, and visiting clubs and shops in downtown Hamilton. On a trip to the Botanical Gardens with his son, Sean, they spotted a freesia hybrid flower called Double Fantasy and thus the album title was born. Another time, having drinks with two local journalists, Lennon came up with the lyrics for “Watching the Wheels.” On the club’s walls flashed projections of turning wheels while one of the journalists lamented to Lennon that he should be writing great songs—not shut in a New York apartment, no longer part of the “big time.” During his stay, he also wrote “I’m Losing You,” “Beautiful Boy” and an early version of “Woman.” During that last summer vacation of his life, Lennon was also inspired to write “Borrowed Time” after listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ album Burnin’. In one of his less-poetic moments, he later described this productive time as “a diarrhea of creativity.”

By all accounts it seemed the sail to Bermuda and his following stay allowed Lennon a rare, much-needed degree of anonymity—and the breezy freedom to create unfettered. It was easy living, that relaxed Caribbean-Anglo vibe, and he was making plans to return the next summer. However, nobody can be quite certain if that would have been by boat or plane. And still, all we know about Captain Hank is what Lennon told us. “He looked like the man on the Zig-Zag rolling papers, with a beard and a scarf on his head and a sextant.”

Graaaaaaaaaaaaah! This is what metal should be.

The coolest thing about Mastodon’s breakthrough effort, 2004’s Leviathan, was its cerebral focus on story and concept in a genre bedeviled (often intentionally) by cliché. Like its predecessor, Blood Mountain is a study in elemental force that rides the line between thrash and plod with enlightened originality and compositional skill to spare. While, lyrically, Blood Mountain cloaks itself in some of the cartoonish tropes of metal’s rune-littered psycho-tundra, musically it’s absolutely breathtaking. Dripping with textures and bubbling with riffs that actually lead somewhere, it offers sonic art in high form while, not incidentally, melting your face with its power.

Admirable but flawed return from one of rock’s most iconic bands.

The Who brand—once symbolic of the enduring power of rock—has aged poorly. There have been too many songs sold to television, too much scandal, too many final tours, too much death, and too little new material from Pete Townshend. Here to rectify the latter is the band’s first studio album since 1982’s It’s Hard. We can be thankful for the record’s mature outlook, and that Townshend and Roger Daltrey (the only surviving members) sound comfortable in their skins. But the songs are mostly weird (two rants were inspired by a viewing of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ; a clunky neo-Tom Waits vocal on “In the Ether”), overly familiar (the synth pattern from “Baba O’Riley” pops up twice in a “new” track) or simply bland (roughly half the remaining songs). A couple sparks flare, mostly during the mini-opera “Wire & Glass,” including the energetic power pop of “We Got a Hit” and the loping, bittersweet title track. But the record is ultimately sad in a way that has nothing to do with art—the sound of creativity spent.

Russia’s preeminent postmodernist, chilled, with a twist.

A Moscow warehouse: Concrete floor. Industrial materials. Cigarette butts. Lifeless vermin. Welcome to Vladimir Sorokin’s ICE, a thriller darkened by the author’s seemingly boundless malice.

Russian readers know Sorokin, like Cormac McCarthy, can be cruel to his characters, and in ICE he holds nothing back. A clandestine religious sect scours Moscow’s seedy underground for recruits—addicts, prostitutes and the like—to “awaken.” Their road to salvation begins with violent hammer strikes to the chest, and their suffering deepens until Sorokin unexpectedly introduces one of the most endearing narrators literature has enjoyed (or perhaps endured) in some time. The book strays here into remembrances of this character and her evangelistic powers—exerted inside the book and, weirdly, outside it.

Critics place Sorokin in the company of other prominent, international postmodern writers—like Murakami and Houellebecq—and he belongs there, albeit on his own shelf. His storytelling is lithe, but deceptive. Each twist corkscrews; each turn regularly halts at a sudden, cerebral abyss.

ICE is the rare novel that tiptoes between the fictional world and the reader’s, as answers arising from the gloom succumb to yet another unforeseen question. In ICE, no one is safe from Sorokin’s brilliantly chilling pen—no character, and certainly no reader.

If you’re scared, say you’re scared.

Horror stories happen in the wilderness.

This seemed like storyteller’s gospel when I was young. Whether it was H.P. Lovecraft’s doomed towns or Shirley Jackson’s lonely, looming The Haunting of Hill House, the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn’t have felt more removed. To make it worse, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with four other people. Who ever heard of a haunted rental unit? While I lost myself in King’s hamlets and Lansdale’s rural nights, I longed for an abyss of my own. A nightmare I recognized.

Dark Gods, T.E.D. Klein’s book of four novellas, felt like a godsend—even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks. You could see such a thing in “Children of the Kingdom,” the first story of the Klein collection.

Set in New York, in 1977, “Children” gives us an unnamed narrator, a man who moves his grandfather, Herman, into a retirement building in upper Manhattan. The narrator lives nearby, but that doesn’t soothe him; this retirement house is on a block full of ethnic Puerto Ricans and Blacks. Herman doesn’t share the narrator’s prejudices, however, and roams the neighborhood freely, befriending an old Costa Rican priest who tells of an ancient race, God’s first attempt at human beings, who so displeased the Lord that he turned them into blind, white, worm-like creatures that must make their home in the dark. In the shadowy sewers of New York, for instance.

The narrator won’t believe a word of it, of course, until the famous citywide blackout of June 1977. Then, for the first time in centuries, the Children of the Kingdom are free to roam.

This kind of thing just made me giddy, and it still does. Klein not only captured geography, he portrayed the essence of New York life: ethnic conflict! Even as a kid, I preferred this over the veiled prejudice rampant in so much of the horror I loved (Lovecraft, King, I could go on). More importantly, it shows that Klein weaves both real and unreal horrors into his novellas: Racism and slithering abominations. The terrors of aging. A “pet” named Petey.

Like all great horror, these tales advise humility. Modern Man believes he’s done away with God, but great artists like Klein despair over what may now hobble or ooze or rush in to take God’s place.

ARTHOUSE DIRECTORS:
1. Richard Linklater
Recent Highlights: A Scanner Darkly, Fast Food Nation, Before Sunset
A role model for indie filmmakers who follow the one-for-them, one-for-me strategy, Linklater has slalomed between Hollywood and the art house—between School of Rock and Before Sunrise—with surprising ease. This year he aimed right up the middle with not one but two films. We’d wait for his movies, but we’re glad we don’t have to.

2. Michel Gondry
Recent Highlights: The Science of Sleep, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Upcoming: Be Kind Rewind
Innovative, quirky and constantly surprising, this year Gondry applied the directing skills that thrilled audiences in Eternal Sunshine to screenwriting with Sleep, his ethereal film exploring a young man’s dreamscapes. Always willing to try something new—whether in film, art or his beloved music videos—he continues to exceed visual expectations.

3. Ang Lee
Recent Highlights: Brokeback Mountain
Upcoming: Lust, Caution
It seemed like a strange idea for a Taiwanese-American director previously known best for a magical kung-fu film to make a movie about gay cowboys. But it no longer seems quite so strange. In fact, most filmgoers will happily trust Ang Lee with any story he cares to tell, including his next (Lust, Caution), a Mandarin-language spy thriller set in WWII-era Shanghai.

4. Christopher Guest
Recent Highlights: For Your Consideration, A Mighty Wind
Guest, who became British royalty in 1996 upon the death of his father, the 4th Baron Haden-Guest, has long been regarded as such in the comedic realm. With his performance in This Is Spinal Tap—and later with his own films Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and now For Your Consideration—he brought the concept of unscripted dialogue to the screen in an unforgettable way, surrounding himself with top-shelf improvisers and allowing the humor to flow out of each actor’s phenomenal comedic instincts.

5. Alejandro González Iñárritu
Recent Highlights: Babel, 21 Grams
When Iñárritu moved his films from Mexico to the States, he brought their puzzle-like plots along, too. But this year his characters outgrew his structural ingenuity—he’s become a director of actors, not just situations. Babel—his fourth collaboration with writer Guillermo Arriaga—is his best work to date, leaving us eager to see what’s next.

6. Alfonso Cuarón
Recent Highlights: Children of Men; paris, je t’aime
Upcoming: México ‘68, The History of Love, The Memory of Running
With only two films to his credit between 1999 and 2005 (the Oscar-winning Y tu mamá también and box-office biggie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), director Cuarón began making up for lost time this year with two excellent new projects, and he’s got three more on the way, including Children of Men, which stars enduring indie favorites Julianne Moore, Clive Owen and Michael Caine.

7. Kevin Macdonald
Recent Highlights: The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void
Upcoming: The 28th Amendment
Having earned his stripes as a documentarian, Oscar winner Macdonald successfully branched out into fiction filmmaking with the fact-based Last King of Scotland, about a Scottish doctor who falls into the orbit of manipulative, bloodthirsty Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Skillfully evoking a lost era of African optimism and squandered opportunity, Macdonald has found a new way to document the truth—through fiction.

8. Spike Lee
Recent Highlights: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Inside Man
Upcoming: Selling Time, NoLa
It’s been 20 years since She’s Gotta Have It, and almost as many since he proved to be a major talent with Do the Right Thing. But if we needed a reminder that Lee still has his finger on the pulse of urban America, we got it, in an urgent, angry, loving tribute to the people of New Orleans. From a proud New Yorker, no less.

9. Pedro Almodóvar
Recent Highlights: Volver, Bad Education
Expanding from his early stint as a creator of campy, outrageously funny comedies, Almodóvar has grown impressively as a filmmaker, getting deeper and more moving without losing his charm. All About My Mother and Talk to Her led the charge; his latest, Volver, won awards at Cannes for best screenplay and best actress (shared by the film’s entire ensemble).

10. Stephen Frears
Recent Highlights: The Queen, Mrs. Henderson Presents
Getting the best performance of Jack Black’s career in High Fidelity is one thing, but doing the same for Helen Mirren is quite a bigger accomplishment, considering the latter’s turn in Calendar Girls. Frears’ latest comes on the heels of a collaboration with another estimable British dame, Judi Dench, in Mrs. Henderson Presents.

11. Werner Herzog
Recent Highlights: Rescue Dawn, The Wild Blue Yonder, Grizzly Man, The White Diamond
Herzog—once best known as a maker of hypnotic, beautiful films like Aguirre, the Wrath of God—has reinvented himself in recent years as an iconoclastic documentarian. His 2005 film, Grizzly Man, was his best effort in years, a spellbinding account of a tragically misguided man’s desire to commune with a decidedly unfriendly natural world.

12. Robert Altman
Recent Highlights: A Prairie Home Companion
Upcoming: Untitled dramatization of Hands on a Hard Body
This year has proven kind to the 81-year-old director of classics like M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and Gosford Park. After over 40 films and seven Oscar nominations, Altman finally took home Hollywood’s most prestigious statue (albeit an honorary award) for “a career that has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audiences alike.” He followed up by revisiting the dying art form of the radio variety show in one his most successful films to date.

13. Darren Aronofsky
Recent Highlights: The Fountain
Upcoming: Flicker, Lone Wolf and Cub
The boy-wonder director of Pi and Requiem for a Dream is a nervy original with a knack for trippy visuals and stories that push characters to the physical and psychological brink—whether they’re in outer space or on Coney Island. When he has the right project, not even the sky’s the limit. SD

14. Michael Winterbottom
Recent Highlights: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Road to Guantanamo, 9 Songs
Upcoming: A Mighty Heart, Genova, Murder in Samarkand
Making three films in the time span it takes other directors to croak out one, the prolific Winterbottom dropped two this year, including the hilarious Tristram Shandy, simultaneously an adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s legendarily unfilmable novel and a comic showcase for star Steve Coogan. Next up: a film about murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, with Angelina Jolie as his wife Mariane.

15. Zhang Yimou
Recent Highlights: Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, House of Flying Daggers
Upcoming: Curse of the Golden Flower
Visual opulence has always been this historically minded director’s calling card, from 1990’s Ju Dou (who knew freshly dyed fabric hung out to dry could be so striking?) and 1991’s Raise the Red Lantern all the way to the heady Daggers. But the true value of this venerable Chinese director is his persistence in proving the emotional conflicts that rule our times have always been with us.

16. Steven Soderbergh
Recent Highlights: Bubble, The Good German
Upcoming: Life Interrupted, Ocean’s Thirteen
He guides single-facet actors like Julia Roberts to the finest performances of their handsomely salaried careers. He makes message movies for the masses (Traffic) and frothy films for the discerning viewer (the Ocean's franchise). And he takes risks: With 2005’s Bubble, Soderbergh floated the idea of simultaneously releasing a movie to theaters, cable and DVD. For a studio player, he plays by his own rules.

17. Sofia Coppola
Recent Highlights: Marie Antoinette, Lost in Translation
It’s shameful that it took until 2004 for a woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar, as was Coppola for Lost in Translation. But she’s much more than a history-book headline. With that understated moodpiece, as well as 1999’s The Virgin Suicides, Coppola set herself apart not just from her prestigious papa but also from her contemporaries, burnishing her characters’ quirks to an illuminating luster.

18. Marc Forster
Recent Highlights: Stranger Than Fiction, Stay, Finding Neverland
Upcoming: The Kite Runner, 36, Dallas Buyer’s Club
Forster’s talent for turning intelligent films into Oscar nominees has given him an opportunity to stretch. Casting Will Ferrell with Emma Thompson in the Eternal Sun-shiny Stranger Than Fiction may be Forster’s bravest leap yet.

19. John Madden
Recent Highlights: Killshot, Proof
British theater met film-noir pulp when executive producer Quentin Tarantino convinced Madden to direct Killshot, based on the Elmore Leonard novel. The Oscar-nominated director (Shakespeare in Love) may not always reach perfection, but he continues to make films with heart and imagination.

20. Kevin Smith
Recent Highlights: Clerks II
In Clerks II—through characters like Dante, Randal, and Jay and Silent Bob—Smith continues championing today’s everyman: the simple mind of a simple man in an even simpler job. Over the course of his decade-plus career, Smith has continually piloted art-house films through the indie tributaries to the edge of—and occasionally straight into—the mainstream.

It very much sprang up out of this theater,” director Nicholas Hytner notes of his new film, The History Boys. “It’s not the usual way. It has a theatrical genesis, it really does, and that’s something that we’re very proud of.” Hytner says “this theater” modestly—Britishly, if you will—as if the place he was describing was something besides London’s National Theatre, founded by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1963, as if the script wasn’t penned by Beyond the Fringe vet and legendary British playwright Alan Bennett, and as if the play hadn’t already picked up a few dozen awards (including six Tonys upon its New York arrival).

Hytner’s tone, however, isn’t inaccurate. The History Boys—which unpacks the complex relationships between eight students and four teachers preparing for the Oxford/Cambridge entrance examinations—is unflinchingly quiet. And, while you can almost hear somebody pitching studio execs on the coming-of-age-beneath-the-tutledge-of-charismatic-mentors-while-characters-grapple-with-homosexuality-and-whatnot narrative (“like a British Dead Poets Society!”), the film itself moves with a grace that belies the network of intricate intrigues driving it.

“The great popular entertainment of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s was incredibly literate,” says Hytner, 50, who took his post at the National Theatre in 2003, nine years after his and Bennett’s first stage/film collaboration, The Madness of King George. “Now we live in a storytelling culture that’s much more image-based. I’m not knocking that; that’s just a fact. And the work that comes out of it is often totally extraordinary, but I think [The History Boys] is a bit of a throwback.”

“It was a compound adjective; you like compound adjectives,” says Frances de la Tour’s history teacher early in the movie, punchlining the use of the word “cunt-struck” in conversation. “Their talk is, in the best sense, mannered,” Hytner assesses, “in the way talk-y films used to be. It cuts against the grain of current film trends, and I think the film isn’t of interest to people who don’t want to see a talk-y film. What you’re trying to do on film is make that dialogue, which is very highly wrought, sound or feel as spontaneous as possible.”

ROMANTICISM
VS. PRACTICALITY
Since George’s success, Hytner has split his time between the screen and stage, directing a 1996 adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible featuring Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis, and stirring up trouble in the London-theater world. “I’m a member of all sorts of interesting minorities,” quipped Hytner—who is both gay and Jewish—as he started work at the National, responding to charges that the theater had anointed just another white, middle-aged, middle-class male as its director. “Indeed I am,” he says of the accusations, “but I’m a lot more things, too.”

The History Boys, which sold out its 2004 opening run before touring internationally, is very much the product of Hytner’s vision: drama that touches on contemporary culture while remaining emotionally enduring. With Bennett’s first work following his 1997 treatment for cancer, the writer delivered, Hytner says, “what he always does: something that’s full of material, going off in all different directions, with the question, ‘What is it about that I’ve just written?’” There is no one answer.

Bennett’s layered dialogue delves into sexuality, of both the teachers and the taught—but also class, the meaning of intelligence, education and the very nature of history itself. “The conflict of ideas at the heart of the film,” Hytner explains, “is between the idea of education as mind-expanding and soul-deepening—the romantic classical ideal—and a utilitarian idea of education, which is purely practical. The reason the film is set in the ’80s is because the ’80s was the final battleground, and the battle was lost by Hector,” the beleaguered teacher played by Richard Griffiths. “The debate is more current now than it was 10 years ago, because now the consequences of the defeat of Hector’s romantic ideal of education are being felt very keenly.”

Concepts aside, The History Boys is about its 12 characters—actors all drawn from Hytner’s original cast at the National—and what happens to them. With a stunning performance by Dominic Cooper, and Griffith’s heartbreakingly sympathetic Hector, the film unfolds patiently—in other words, with actual drama.

STAGE TO SCREEN
“There is no absolute dramatic truth,” Hytner asserts. “film acting is inherently no more truthful than theater acting, and film acting is ultimately, for the actor, a much less empowering experience than theater acting. A film actor’s performance is ultimately going to be so screwed with in post-production that what gets delivered to you, the viewer, is kind of a technological construct.

“Theater acting, of course, is not screwed with, and—if it’s at its best—it can be unamplified and unaccompanied and theatrically naked. That is acting which has a greater potential for unadorned truth than film acting can ever have.”

And, whether Hytner is right—whether German theorist Walter Benjamin is right; that industrially produced art has less of an aura than directly experienced art—it is a fascinating premise upon which to direct films. It comes across in nearly every frame of The History Boys, including several delightful music-set montages that function in knowing homage to the great high-school comedies of the ’80s.

It is perhaps a backwards way to make films, but—if one has the time to pull off “200-odd” performances before cameras roll—it seems sound. “The Marx brothers used to take routines out on the road, to see how they worked,” Hytner recalls, “and the danger is that what you’re freezing is something theatrically contrived, but you have to guard against that. “I’ve watched the film with large audiences. Parts of it do work like the play works, and I like that. I’ve not watched it the way it’s gonna be halfway through its fourth week, on a weekday matinee with 12 people in the house.” He pauses, perhaps mentally comparing the theater where he works with the proverbial empty matinee. “Though,” he continues, “it seems okay on DVD.”

Anthony Swofford -- Exit A Celebrated Jarhead author leads a raid into fiction

Anthony Swofford is a brave man. He didn’t have to write a novel, for godsakes, as a follow-up to Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. That first book, hailed as a “searing contribution to the literature of combat” by the NYT, earned praise at every keyboard. The easy path? More nonfiction, soldiers, guns, testosterone. More money.

Still, here’s the fiction. And while Swofford's talent glints many places, the basic training of a first-time novelist shows through in equal measure.

The story lies in comfortable country for an ex-Marine—Yokota, a U.S. military base near Tokyo. A straight-arrow high-school-football star, Severin Boxx, takes a fancy to Virginia, the rebellious half-Japanese daughter of the base general. Virginia’s obsession with the American movie Bonnie and Clyde draws her toward the Japanese underworld. Severin, to protect his first love, makes a choice that simultaneously saves and mars both young lives.

Swofford's most promising sign of potential as a novelist is Part II. Here the book rises from unsteady potboiler, brocaded in the colors of urban Tokyo, to more convincing literary fiction. Whatever had been thin in characterization and plausibility deepens, and Swofford does a better job of winning the hard war for a reader’s belief.

Sean Manning (ed.) -- The Show I’ll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concert-Going Experience

This collection of essays contains mostly hits and a couple flops. At the top of the charts is Chuck Klosterman’s funny, finely crafted essay about seeing a Prince concert in Fargo, N.D. It was 1997, during Prince’s “preposterous TAFKAP period,” writes Klosterman, who was there to write a newspaper review, and thus faced a tight deadline. With the clock ticking, and no sign of Prince, Klosterman envisions the moody artist “walking onto the stage and wordlessly holding up four inexplicable fingers for the duration of the evening.”

Klosterman considers submitting a simple review: “Prince is a jerk.” But when Prince finally arrives, Klosterman has an epiphany. Watching the artist play numerous instruments “better than anyone ever had played them before,” he realizes Prince is a genius: “His ability to create and perform music is so inherent and instinctual that it cannot really be measured against normal criteria.” As a writer, Klosterman is similarly gifted.

In many of these essays, the music is secondary. Writer Luc Sante vividly describes the 1980s New York City punk scene, specifically detailing a 1981 concert where former Sex Pistol John Lydon taunts the crowd and triggers a riot, forcing Lydon’s band (Public Image Ltd.) to flee the stage. Jon Raymond’s essay expresses his loathing of “corporate” rocker Jon Bon Jovi. At a 1989 Bon Jovi concert, Raymond gets ejected by security and proceeds to the parking lot, where he jumps on top of cars and pisses in the backseat of a BMW.

The most memorably bizarre essay involves biographer David Ritz and blues legend Jimmy Reed. Reed performed in Dallas in 1958, when Ritz was a high-school reporter. Ritz asked Reed for a post-concert interview, and the bluesman invited the teenager into his limo. Just as the shy Ritz begins the interview, Reed starts arguing with his girlfriend. “Before I knew it,” writes Ritz, “Reed whipped out a razor blade from inside his jacket and … cut the woman on her upper arm.” A brawl ensued.

A determined Ritz waits in the limo outside a hospital while Reed and his girlfriend receive medical attention. Afterward, the three eat at an all-night restaurant, where the couple “doted affection on each other like newlyweds.” Ritz finally gets to ask Reed a question: “I just want to know about the blues.” Reed looks him square in the face. “You don’t know about the blues. You live them.”

There are also strong essays about Woodstock, a wonderful essay by Diana Ossana describing how seeing Led Zeppelin helped her recover from a failed marriage, and engaging, insightful pieces about Beck, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana and The Pogues. Lowpoints include poet Paul Muldoon’s obscure, overly academic essay on seeing Horslip in Belfast, and novelist Lynne Tillman’s dull take on The Rolling Stones. “They had no affect,” writes Tillman, and neither does her essay.

While there are some glaring omissions (Bob Dylan) and some questionable inclusions (Kevin Spacey singing Bobby Darin), overall this collection is well worth the ticket price.

Onstage at a packed club, Ori Kaplan peers over his saxophone into the audience. Middle-aged orthodox-Jewish men, women in Stevie Nicks-style gypsy blouses, crusty punks and college hipsters all dance side by side. It’s the kind of diversity that takes Kaplan’s band, Balkan Beat Box, closer to its goal—a goal even more elusive than the band’s fusion of Jewish klezmer melodies, Balkan brass-band stomp and frenetic gypsy rhythms with hip-hop, reggae and electro production. “We want to create utopia,” says Kaplan. “And music is a blank page on which to do it.”

Kaplan and drummer Tamir Muskat, Israeli transplants to New York City, aren’t alone in their belief that music can change the world. By the time Kaplan departed his previous band (gypsy-punkers Gogol Bordello) to found Balkan Beat Box with Muskat, he’d seen what a rock band could do for an oft-derided culture. Today, groups influenced by Eastern European music—the so-called “Balkan beat” from which Kaplan’s band gets its name—can be heard at rock shows and in dance clubs across America and Europe. And with artists like Devotchka, Beirut, Gogol Bordello and Balkan Beat Box making an impact beyond the “world music” bins, the idea of changing the world’s perceptions no longer seems far-fetched.

DOWN, SET, HUTZ!
As ambassadors for downtrodden cultures go, the Roma—commonly referred to as gypsies—could do a lot worse than Eugene Hutz. Since emigrating to New York City from Ukraine, Hutz has taken his gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello from punk bars to headlining national tours, and garnered critical acclaim starring alongside Elijah Wood in Everything Is Illuminated. He’s gregarious, hard-working and unfailingly self-confident. In other words, according to Hutz, he’s simply a gypsy musician. “Music was always the gypsy’s sure way to make a living,” says Hutz. “So how do you ensure you make a living? You have to kick everybody’s ass! You have to make everyone know that you’re the best, to get paid. You have to be mobile, loud, and have to blow everybody the f— away.”

For Gogol Bordello, this attitude translates into the band’s elaborate, often chaotic stage show—frenetic punk energy with gypsy instrumentation and theatricality. The result in the U.S. has been Gogol’s rise to the big leagues—the band’s last album, Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike, was equally lauded by rawk ’zines and NPR, and they now regularly sell out venues from New York to L.A. to Paris. But when Gogol began its endless touring five years ago, gypsy music was—like most folk-influenced Eastern European sounds—relegated to world-music mags.

“Our band was determined to get out of what we all call the ‘world music ghetto,’” says Hutz. “It’s a very nasty marketing trap that many musicians can’t get out of. However, our band is essentially a cruising rock ’n’ roll machine, and soon proved that our place is not only in the cultural centers and the biennials. And that turned around a lot of thinking about this kind of music.”

BAND OF GYPSIES
While Gogol Bordello was spouting punk rock with heavy accents in New York City, a quieter, second-generation gypsy revolution was occurring in Denver. Devotchka—a quartet of musicians from diverse rock, ethnic and classical backgrounds—has described itself as “Eastern Bloc indie rock.” On more recent albums, like How it Ends, Devotchka incorporates spaghetti-western and Tex-Mex sounds into its Tom Waitsian stagger. But founder and frontman Nick Urata says Balkan beat will always be there.

“My grandmother is from Italy and always told us we had gypsy blood,” Urata says. “I heard all that great accordion music as a young kid and it stuck with me when I was trying to find my own musical voice.”

With a violin and tuba in Devotchka, it’s hard not to stray into gypsy-string, Balkan-brass and polka territory. But the important thing is to incorporate it all into a new setting. “We found very early on that when you went for the fully traditional stuff, it was not as liberating,” he says. “A lot of the frustration with the musicians in my band was that they’d hook up with tango or Balkan or polka bands, and it was too traditional—they wanted to step outside and bring it into today. That was our philosophy.”

It’s a philosophy shared by bands like the Santa Fe, N.M. (via Brooklyn), Beirut—essentially songwriter Zach Condon—whose Gulag Orkestar showcases a love for brass bands learned during European pilgrimages. Beirut’s fiery instrumentation and somber indie-pop songwriting take Balkan beat in an entirely different direction from both its strings-and-brass roots and its contemporary punk-and-beats sound. As Balkan Beat Box’s Ori Kaplan says, that’s the whole idea.

“There needs to be [both] kinds of bands,” he says. “The revival bands interested in maintaining tradition, and those interested in revolutionizing it—bands not just playing a repertoire, but creating a new breed.”

It’s a golden afternoon on the last day of the longest, hottest summer England has ever known, and Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon, Tony Allen and Simon Tong are sitting outside a café in west London—in October—fretting about preparations for their first big show together. “You can’t just choose any old piano,” insists Albarn to his management. “It’s got to have the right action.”

The group—who are emphatically not called The Good, The Bad And The Queen (“Who on earth would call their band that?!” laughs Simonon through a gap-toothed grin, perhaps understandably relieved that people won’t speculate which one is “the Queen”)—is booked to perform in London at the newly reopened Roundhouse, an old railway building in Chalk Farm, that once hosted several of the most mind-blowing performances in rock history, including legendary shows by Pink Floyd and The Ramones. Their rehearsal studio, just across the road from the café, is a converted church just a short stroll from the Rough Trade record shop—spiritual home of London’s original punk scene, haunt of The Slits, Scritti Politti and, of course, Simonon’s old group, The Clash.

A wily psycho-geographer—one of those maverick urban historians like Peter Ackroyd or Iain Sinclair—would undoubtedly appreciate the chronic resonance of the two locations, perhaps even plot them on a lye line or vital network of the city’s psychic hotspots. It’s something that’s not lost on the group. In many ways, the haunted streets of London are the real subject of the record they’ve made. “It’s a kind of time capsule on the top of a hill, this record,” says Albarn. “Sometimes it goes under the ground, sometimes up in the air, and sometimes underwater. Because under the water is the past, isn’t it? The songs go back into the past, and maybe into the future as well.”

The band that Albarn has assembled for this topsy-turvy musical time travelogue may be his strongest and strangest yet—which is saying something coming from the man who dreamt up the hip-hop Hanna-Barbera that is Gorillaz. Alongside Simonon there’s Simon Tong—once a member of The Verve, now Albarn’s right-hand guitarist both in Blur and Gorillaz. On drums there’s Tony Allen—Afrobeat pioneer, musical director of Fela Kuti’s bands through the ages and, according to Brian Eno, “perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived.” And corralling the whole show, directing, if you like, is Danger Mouse—aka Brian Burton—who not only decided which songs went on the album, but also their order.

“We needed somebody like that,” acknowledges Simonon. “The thing about Damon is that he’s very good at delegation. So [the final choice] was Brian’s job. And that was good, because it caused a situation where there was no bickering.” So did they miss a bit of creative tension in the studio? Not at all, Simonon laughs: “In the end, bickering is just really expensive.”

This new band started as a twinkle in the eye of one of Albarn’s old projects. “It started with the last song that the full lineup of Blur recorded,” he says, pulling thoughtfully on a cigarette. “It was ‘Music Is My Radar’ and it had that lyric ‘Tony Allen got me dancing!’” He pauses to remember which particular song inspired the line. “I think it would be ‘Zombies’ maybe. Yeah, that is the tune, that is the tune!” He grins madly across the room at Allen, who cracks up. “The way it stops and it starts!”

Hearing of Albarn’s lyrical eulogy and inspired by his sense of melody and way with a melodica, Allen got in touch, inviting him to work on his 2002 record, HomeCooking. They got along so well that they hatched a plan to record together in Allen’s native Nigeria. But something about the sessions didn’t quite work out. “I didn’t feel it had the balance I was looking for,” admits Albarn, “you know, not making an African record—making a cross-cultural record.”

It’s a problem he’s come across before—recording Malian Music under the aegis of Oxfam back in 2002. The solution, the crucial balance this time, came in a brainwave: How great would it be to get Tony Allen and Paul Simonon playing together? Others might have been content to splice the two together electronically; Albarn got on the phone. It turned out he and Simonon lived two streets apart. These days, the duo comprise a fond mutual-appreciation club: “If two records define that point in your life when you become a teenager and start listening to things and really getting into music, [to me] it would be The Specials and [The Clash’s] Combat Rock,” says Albarn.

“Making the record,” agrees Simonon, “was a nice chance to meet Damon properly and have a really good conversation.”

Apparently at the behest of producer and ardent anglophile Burton, the new supergroup decided to try and make a “very English” record. In a circuitous way, with The Good, The Bad And The Queen, Albarn is returning to some of the themes and subject matter he chronicled, celebrated and bemoaned on Blur’s defining Britpop album, Parklife—a record he seems to have spent much of the last 12 years singing himself away from.

“You had to really…” he groans, still bristling at the thought, even now. “It was all the things that came with it—the juvenile aspect, the Labour Government, the proliferation of football culture in every single nuance of life. I had to move away from that because it was misinterpreted. That’s partly my fault for playing with that imagery. … But it was an album made by a bunch of kids just really in love with the possibilities of pop music. I’d just like to make it clear: The only thing I meant by saying [that the new record is a natural successor to Parklife] is that it’s a very London record in the way that that record was.”

It strikes an oddly contemporary chord, what with British pop right now. From the Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys to the Long Blondes and Lily Allen, it’s abundantly awash with young musicians whose sensibilities were in many ways defined by Britpop Mark One. But Albarn is reluctant to feel any satisfaction because of his influence. “I don’t feel a sense of achievement, no. I feel, as Jack Black would say, a desire to get to the NOOO-KLEEE-US of music. I don’t really look at any of that.”

The nucleus in the case of TGTBATQ is a kind of modern, multicultural, English folk song, but not in any straightforward or revivalist sense. Tracks have titles like “Bunting Song” and “A Soldier’s Tale” that might have come from William Blake. They carry ancient echoes of public hangings, document moments of innocence (the whale that swam up the Thames this year) and experience (crackheads passed out in the city sun), and they labor dolefully under the gathering clouds of war. If you were to plot the musical coordinates of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town,” The Specials’ “Ghost Town,” Pink Floyd’s “The Scarecrow” and Tricky’s “Aftermath,” you might find TGTBATQ right at the heart of them. As much as the record might be hailed as a successor to Parklife, with its repeated references to ocean levels, floods and tidal waves, you might just as easily see it as a worried sequel to London Calling—a dreamy final broadcast from a city on the brink. Just like Joe Strummer, they live by the river.

“‘Green Fields’ is about both the actual tidal wave and a … metaphysical one,” says Albarn about the most affecting song on the record. “It was written one very drunk night on Goldhawk Road and then forgotten. And after the intervening period—of 9/11, of the tidal wave, of the war—it ended up here. But the last line on the record is upbeat!” he insists cheerily. “The sun is coming out!”

For Simonon the frantic psych-out of the title track is perfectly in keeping with the often baleful mood elsewhere on the record: “It’s saying that the world is falling apart—but rather than ‘let’s go and hang ourselves,’ it’s saying ‘let’s go out and make the most of it.’ And in some ways be positive!”

Is it a political album? “Well it’s not an apolitical record” demurs Albarn. The mood of the record often seems fatalistic rather than angry or militant: “Drink all day, ’cos the country’s at war” runs one line from the appropriately titled “Kingdom of Doom.” “It’s about growing older and wiser,” suggests Simonon, “realizing that one doesn’t need to jump and shout. It’s not doing [politics] in a lyric sense; it’s approaching it in a different way. I think it’s clear on our stance, where we stand as human beings.” “It’s about collective responsibility,” says Albarn explicating the line, ‘The crackheads on the green, they’re a political party.’ That is the message if there’s a political one. Understand people; don’t just kick them in the face. Understand why your social interaction doesn’t work.”

The Good, The Bad And The Queen adds up to, among other things, another brazenly inventive chapter in Damon Albarn’s restless career since he first hit the charts as a pie-eyed baggy bowlhead back in the early 1990s. As we speak, Jarvis Cocker is emblazoned across every pop magazine, preparing the country for his eponymous debut. A couple months ago Thom Yorke released his own low-key solo outing. As good or even great as these records are, they rarely stray from what we’ve come to expect from both men. By comparison with his contemporaries, Albarn has tacked—often against the prevailing winds—a quite unique, idiosyncratic course: from boyband psych-pop to Little England classicism; from lo-fi obliquery to hockey-crowd anthems; from African collaborations to the 21st-century Archies. It feels almost counterintuitive to say it of a bloke who’s spent 15 years in a Fred Perry shirt, but Damon Albarn may just be the most shape-shifting and adventurous British pop musican since David Bowie.

Put it to the man himself, however, and he’s roused into a vehement denial that the new group might be, say, a natural reaction to the more pop emphasis of the last few years of Gorillaz. “It’s not all a reaction at all!” he says, apoplectic at the very idea. “We were making this record at the same time as Simon and me were going to the Harlem Apollo to perform with Gorillaz! They are all a continuation. That’s just something that the British press and British journalists make up—they feel that there have to be lists, there have to be sequences, everything has to have a negative relation to what’s gone before.”

But didn’t he recently tell Uncut that “as for putting out pop music, that’s over?” “Well, in a way, but hopefully something else will come out of that,” he sighs. “We’re in the infancy of a whole new proliferation, and that’s exciting in itself. But hopefully one that ends up with people not being ghettoized … and being able to absorb lots of different influences.”

Albarn’s “proliferation” looks set to blossom even further in 2007, with the much anticipated Gorillaz feature film supposedly crawling out of development limbo (though whether this was helped or hindered by the assistance of filmmaker Terry Gilliam remains to be seen), and an ambitious musical stage production of the Chinese Monkey King myth—developed in collaboration with director Chen Shi-Zheng and Gorillaz cohort Jamie Hewlett, and featuring Shaolin monks and the Peking Opera—at the Manchester International Festival at the end of February.

But for now there’s that damned piano to be sourced and some warm-up shows to play way down in the countryside of southwest England. “First we’re going to take South Devon,” declares Albarn mock-determinedly to his new bandmates, plotting the first steps of this latest eccentric, oblique and oft-inspired musical campaign. “Then we take the world.”

San Diego rockers continue tackling the Big Questions.

Switchfoot’s sixth record, Oh! Gravity, finds the band wrestling with a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction, hauling in the usual culprits—faith, love and modern American life. From this psychic angst bursts an album that poses more questions than it answers, packed with restless dreamers and lovers spinning in endless circles. “American Dream” may come closest to some kind of solution, offering, “When success is equated with excess, the ambition for excess wrecks us,” and later proclaiming, “This ain’t my American dream.” But the same sense of dissatisfaction fueling tunes like “Faust, Midas, and Myself” and “Burn Out Bright” seems to drive the album from one genre to the next to the next, with the production feeling heavy-handed on some songs. Most awkward is the first single “Dirty Second Hands,” which the band pegs as “alt-country.” Instead it comes off like a throwaway Alice In Chains B-side, tarnishing an otherwise strong album of bitingly contemplative, rocking power pop.

If at first you do succeed, try, try again.

Sophomore slump? What sophomore slump? On the follow-up to Get Lifted, the Grammy-winning multi-platinum debut from John Legend, the one-time session man chucks the simple old-school nostalgia for a collection of music that’s genuinely legendary. He jumps out of Once Again with the breezy, retro-futuristic pop of the album’s first single, “Save Room,” a song so silky and seductive that when my dad heard me playing it, he assumed I was listening to some long-lost gem from the Bacharach/David catalog. (It actually does borrow the melody of the 1968 Classics IV single, “Stormy,” introduced to Legend by producer will.i.am.)

“Save Room” is followed by two more nuggets of radio-friendly sweetness, the gospelish, Kanye West-produced “Heaven” and the spare, percussive “Stereo.” But it isn’t until the fourth song, the brilliant Raphael Saadiq/Craig Street-produced “Show Me,” that Legend reaches for the real Heaven. The nearly seven-minute-long composition begins on a bed of Hendrix electric-guitar strumming, then soars to new galaxies with Legend’s voice conjuring the spirit of Jeff Buckley. Yep, it’s that ambitious.

Each track is so tasty I’m tempted to make this a song-by-song menu review, but Once Again is more than just a random collection of great tunes. Legend has grown by leaps on this disc, delivering a richer sound and more adventurous experimentation. Toward the end of “Save Room,” the organ part gets a little crazy and then abruptly vanishes. The gritty “Slow Dance” would be straight-up old-style R&B were it not skewed slightly by the flatulent sound of a tuba and more Hendrix riffage. And the jazzy piano intro to “Maxine” gives way to bright strings and papier-mâché-like percussion.

Amid all this zagging are strong melodies that would stand on their own without all the frills, and some of the tracks do just that. The piano ballad “Where Did My Baby Go,” for example, is pure Stevie Wonder loveliness. And in a rich croon that recalls Hootie & the Blowfish singer Darius Rucker (though with much more soul), Legend closes the album with “Coming Home,” the simple tale of a soldier longing for his return to U.S. soil. Legend’s own return is no less momentous.

By: Saul Austerlitz, Tim Basham, Carter Davis, Rob Davis, Steve Dollar, Sean Edgar, Kristina Feliciano, Holly Haworth, Katie Heimer, Josh Jackson, Jason Killingworth, Rachael Maddux, Amber North, Tim Regan-Porter and Sarah Schmelling

Welcome to Paste’s 2nd Annual Art House Powerhouse, where we celebrate the individuals and organizations behind the films we love. The past year has been a great one for indie cinema. Oscar and Golden Globe nominations were dominated by films from directors Ang Lee, Bennett Miller, Fernando Meirelles, David Cronenberg, Niki Caro and Noah Baumbach. The Best Actor was truly the best actor (Paste cover subject, Philip Seymour Hoffman)—not the most famous, prettiest or longest-past-due. Linklater and Soderbergh returned to the fold. Little Miss Sunshine demonstrated the sustaining power of word-of-mouth. And—with efforts from Google, YouTube, iTunes and Amazon—smaller films received more exposure than ever before.

Paste’s Art House Powerhouse isn’t simply a list of our critical favorites. These entrants help quality independent film keep operating at the level it’s now achieved. They elevate the craft, draw audiences and keep the engines of commerce running in support of the most skilled, unique voices out there. This isn’t a buzz-list or a box-office tally, though both of those attributes count. We’re looking for those who brilliantly combine art and commerce, powering indie cinema in the process.

Here are the top movers and shakers of the past year’s art house world…

ARTHOUSE ACTORS:
1. Philip Seymour Hoffman
Recent Highlights: Capote
Upcoming: The Savages, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Thanks to a transformative turn as Truman Capote (a feat to marvel at from a former running back more often shaggy than effete), Hoffman finally nabbed the Oscar everyone knew he was due. And no post-prize slump is pending. The actor has a string of roles ahead, including films with old-school A-listers Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet and imaginatively whacked screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman.

2. Gael García Bernal
Recent Highlights: Babel, The Science of Sleep, The King, Bad Education, Motorcycle Diaries
Upcoming: Défecit, Rudo y Cursi, El Pasado
Evolving through roles from a young Che Guevara to an Almodóvar cross-dresser, chameleon-like Mexican actor García Bernal also successfully tried his hand at melancholy comedy this year in Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep. He should expect more Stateside recognition after reuniting with Alejandro González Iñárritu for Babel alongside Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

3. Forest Whitaker
Recent Highlights: The Last King of Scotland, Mary
Upcoming: Ripple Effect, The Air I Breathe, Vantage Point
Easy to take for granted, Whitaker’s looming presence and deceptively soft-spoken manner sneak up on one great performance after another. As Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, he’s winning the kind of acclaim that precedes Oscar nominations.

4. Juliette Binoche
Recent Highlights: Caché (Hidden), Bee Season, Mary, Breaking and Entering
Upcoming: A Few Days in September, Souvenirs du Valois
She seemed the reincarnated spirit of Louise Brooks in 1986’s Mauvais Sang, and then, one film later, Binoche was playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She’s zig-zagged ever since, from French to English, light to dark, but always with integrity.

5. Aaron Eckhart
Recent Highlights: Thank You For Smoking, The Black Dahlia, The Wicker Man
Upcoming: No Reservations, Bill
In Thank You For Smoking, Eckhart dials the self-confident charm up so high that he has us pulling for the tobacco industry’s arrogant, soulless spokesman. His growing status as a go-to actor for edgy directors—in addition to original patron Neil LaBute—means he’ll likely grace this list many times in the future.

6. Greg Kinnear
Recent Highlights: Little Miss Sunshine, Fast Food Nation, Invincible, The Matador
Upcoming: Unknown, The Feast of Love
Almost 10 years after his Oscar-nominated supporting role in As Good As It Gets, Kinnear, with subtle brilliance, plays a burger-chain exec in Fast Food Nation, and he perfectly quirks it up as the motivational-speaker/dad in Little Miss Sunshine.

7. Julianne Moore
Recent Highlights: Freedomland, Children of Men
Upcoming: Savage Grace, Next, I’m Not There
Passion and intelligence have made Moore a muse for a generation of smart filmmakers as divergent of sensibility as Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Haynes and companion Bart Freundlich.

8. Matt Dillon
Recent Highlights: Crash, Factotum
Rare among handsome fellows in Hollywood, Dillon has slipped into one ugly character after another without denting his charisma. Whether it’s Bukowski’s hard-drinking alter ego in Factotum or the racist cop in Crash, his well-rounded performances give his twisted characters a halo of charm. In his hands, they’re flawed, cocksure and redeemable.

9. Cate Blanchett
Recent Highlights: Babel, The Good German, Little Fish
Upcoming: I’m Not There, Notes on a Scandal, The Golden Age
Coffee & Cigarettes, but they’re not portrayed by two actresses. It’s just the multi-talented Cate Blanchett, of whom there’s certainly only one. She can paint with detail or broad strokes—the big-movie bravado of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator or the chilly desperation of the wife in Babel—and we believe her every time.

10. Natalie Portman
Recent Highlights: V for Vendetta, Free Zone, Goya’s Ghosts
Upcoming: My Blueberry Nights, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
Portman shaved her head for Vendetta and spawned dozens of YouTube tributes with her satirical, foul-mouthed rap on SNL. An obvious candidate for the art house she’s not. But she was a revelation in Closer, and her preternatural ability to turn on the waterworks electrified Free Zone, so we’re not surprised director Wong Kar-wai is calling for My Blueberry Nights; we’re just thrilled she’s answering.

11. David Strathairn
Recent Highlights: Good Night, and Good Luck, The Notorious Bettie Page, We Are Marshall
Upcoming: My Blueberry Nights, Fracture
Grizzled character actor Strathairn grabbed the opportunity to play a paragon of moral rigor, starring in George Clooney’s Edward R. Murrow biopic. Having snagged an Oscar nomination and a boatload of goodwill from frustrated liberals, he’ll appear next in My Blueberry Nights.

12. Felicity Huffman
Recent Highlights: Transamerica
Upcoming: Georgia Rule
In between TV gigs (Sports Night, Desperate Housewives) Huffman gave one of 2005’s best and most transformative performances in Transamerica, as a preoperative male-to-female transsexual finally getting to know her long-lost son.

13. Heath Ledger
Recent Highlights: Brokeback Mountain, Lords of Dogtown, Casanova
Upcoming: I’m Not There, The Dark Knight
Ledger finally made good on his promise with his affecting turn as Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain. Laconic, crabbed, disinclined to speak, Ledger’s Ennis nonetheless compressed decades of suppressed emotion into a single glance, the caress of a blood-stained shirt, or a lone, choked-off oath. Without Ledger’s remarkable performance, it’d be hard to imagine Brokeback Mountain at all.

14. Maria Bello
Recent Highlights: A History of Violence, Thank You for Smoking
Upcoming: Butterfly on a Wheel
At once tough and tender, Bello brings a refreshing, grown-up sexuality to the screen, and a sense of inner strength that allows her characters real emotional exposure. At 39, her career has only begun to hit its stride.

15. Parker Posey
Recent Highlights: For Your Consideration, The OH in Ohio
Upcoming: Fay Grim, Spring Breakdown
As the youngest member of Christopher Guest’s esteemed comedy troupe, Posey is the raison d’etre for DVD outtakes. Her career choices are as unpredictable as her grinning, gum-chewing, fast-talking characters. And she seems game for anything. So Fay from Henry Fool will return to the screen in an espionage thriller? We’re there.

16. Zach Braff
Recent Highlights: The Last Kiss, Garden State
Upcoming: Fast Track, Open Hearts
Braff embodied 25-year-old angst in Garden State (which he also wrote and directed) and then 30-year-old angst in The Last Kiss. But he returns to comedy alongside fellow small-screen stars Amanda Peet and Jason Batemen in Fast Track, and is rumored to be stepping into the shoes of Chevy Chase in the upcoming Fletch prequel.

17. Maggie Gyllenhaal
Recent Highlights: Stranger Than Fiction, Sherrybaby, World Trade Center, Monster House
After her breakout role in Secretary, it was only a matter of time before Gyllenhaal took on something meaty enough to generate Oscar buzz. A dozen films later and the actress’ portrayal of an ex-con single mom struggling to keep straight for the sake of her child in Sherrybaby could finally give her a chance to meet the Golden Boy.

18. Amy Adams
Recent Highlights: Junebug, Talladega Nights
Upcoming: Enchanted, Barry Munday, Charlie Wilson’s War
Oscar-nominated for her firecracker turn in Junebug, Adams articulated complexities where many would’ve settled for caricature. She has nuance to burn, as wider audiences will learn as she moves into bigger dramatic roles—including a part in Mike Nichols’ arms-dealer saga Charlie Wilson’s War.

19. Daniel Brühl
Recent Highlights: The Edukators, Joyeux Noël, Ladies in Lavendar
Upcoming: Salvador, In Transit, Two Days
For his breakthrough role in Goodbye Lenin! in 2003, Brühl received best-actor honors at the European Film Awards, and was also nominated in 2004 for his performance in The Edukators. Next up for the Barcelona-born, Cologne-raised talent is the Cannes-nominated Salvador, in which he plays Spanish anarchist and bank robber Salvador Puig Antich.

20. Catherine Keener
Recent Highlights: Friends With Money, Capote
Upcoming: An American Crime, Into the Wild
Her early performances in under-the-radar fare like Your Friends and Neighbors and Walking and Talking still hold up. And her current ones—in Friends With Money and Capote, which earned her a second Oscar nomination—are consistently knockouts. She does comedy; she does drama. The only thing she doesn’t do is disappoint.

Director: Billy Corben
Cinematography: Armando Salas
Studio info: Magnolia Pictures, 118 mins.

Cocaine Cowboys is a stimulating head rush of a documentary, diagramming the surreal and vicious history behind Miami’s notorious drug wars during the ’70s and ’80s. Director Billy Corben constructs a hyperactive slideshow of neon glitz and harrowing interview footage, packing grainy, hand-held police video around direct accounts of some of the most infamous movers behind the trafficking. Corben focuses on three main characters in the film; playboy distributor Jon Pernell Roberts, crafty smuggler Mickey Munday and remorseless hit man Jorge “Rivi” Ayala. The first two deliver rags-to-riches tales of their makeshift entrepreneurship as they pioneer cocaine deliveries from Columbia to U.S. shores. The real star, though, is Ayala, who nonchalantly recounts his contract-killing spree with the affable demeanor of a family member reminiscing at the dinner table. The footage moves disturbingly fast for a nonfiction film, injecting the audience into the tumultuous era’s strung-out decadence and anxiety with an authenticity the History Channel rarely achieves.

David Fulmer — The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues

A roscoe coughs. A blonde slumps over, dead as Vaudeville

I’m thinking someone told author David Fulmer the story of Christ, then he had a dream about it—with facts, anecdotes and images conflated in dreamlike fashion in 1920s Atlanta, complete with cops, robbers and luscious dames.

This is not to say The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues is surreal (or religious). On the contrary, it’s a straightforward, well-written, hard-nosed crime drama that Fulmer sometimes pushes to the brink of believability, leaving a reader with no idea how protagonist Joe Rose might escape his latest jam. Rose must solve a high-profile heist for which he’s been framed, and for which his friends, both white and black, are being murdered.

Rose is of mixed race, and he moves freely between the racial worlds of Prohibition-era Atlanta. It’s a great advantage for solving crimes—and crime writing.

The novel has dual endings. The first seems true to the characters. The second, six lines later, smacks of editorial intervention. Even so, the book vividly brings to life an Atlanta long gone—and characters to die for.

Dave Eggers — What Is The What?

Gen X’s most gifted author gives voice to a former Sudanese refugee

For those of us in the Gen X rearguard, few books articulate our unique recipe of existential angst as well as Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Even so, I cringed when I learned that the master of meta-self-awareness planned to assume the voice of a Sudanese refugee for his next marginally fictionalized memoir.

Having made four trips to Africa, I could hardly imagine meeting anyone on the continent’s darker reaches who wouldn’t frown on the cynical navel-gazing of A Heartbreaking Work. In nakedly exposing his own need for attention and moral superiority, Eggers exuded a spoiled slacker condescension that somehow managed, despite all, to be endearing. It mocked its own flaws. But, who has time for narcissism in a work where boys are being abducted into slavery by Arab raiders, recruited by rebel forces, beaten by unsympathetic villagers or eaten by lions?

Fortunately, not Eggers.

With the success of A Heart-breaking Work and his quarterly journal McSweeney’s, Eggers no longer needs to prove his staggering genius; and in the lives of the Lost Boys portrayed in this work, there’s no shortage of heartbreak. The author is free to simply tell a story. And it’s a hell of a story—in every possible sense of the word.

What Is The What begins in Atlanta. Protagonist Valentino Achak Deng has been