The dried shore mud at his feet had broken up into a far-flung network of almost regular polygons (for the most part six-sided). As he examined the cracks, they began little by little to work on him, but instead of fragmenting him like the ground, they joined all his cells (a void that he hadn’t noticed until then) into a harmonious whole. Something that rose from the split surface of the earth struck his body and made it warm and heavy. Standing there motionless, looking out over the pattern, he saw himself as a receiver, not of news or a message, but of a twofold force received on the two levels of his head. On his forehead, he felt the bone disappearing, simply because he had no other thought than to expose this obstacle to the air; and the surface of his face from the eyes down seemed once again to acquire the characteristics of a face; human eyes and a human mouth, each for itself but not separated by consciousness; and he actually felt that his lowered lids had become receiving screens. His head bent lower and lower, yet the meaning was not despair but determination: “The decision rests with me.” Raising his eyes, he was prepared for anything; with every look, even into the void, he would have met other looks; indeed, he would have created them.

The murmuring of the stream – and once again the bushes were murmuring as gently as on the summer day when he arrived and gained his first intimation of the river landscape.

The man who rose from the ground was not ecstatic, only appeased. He no longer expected illuminations, only measure and duration. “My face an unfinished sketch – when will it be complete?” He could say that he enjoyed life, accepted death, and loved the world; and now he saw that, correspondingly, the river flowed more slowly, the clumps of grass shimmered, and the sun-warmed gasoline drums hummed. Beside him he saw a single yellow willow leaf on a flaming-red branch and knew that after his death, after the death of all mankind, he would appear in the depths of this countryside and give form to all the things on which his gaze now rested. The thought gave him a blissful feeling that raised him above the treetops; only his face remained behind, now a mask “representing happiness.” (And then there was even a kind of hope – disguised as a feeling that he knew something.)

pp 45-46

The suspense has been excrutiating, I know.

A note or two on the list: if there were a #1 in my brain here, it’d either be Bon Iver or Erykah Badu; #1 in my heart, maybe Women. Been kind of “not liking music” lately (this is the reason for the delay), but we’ll try to get things back on track here at of Maine HQ. I’ll either talk about things I do like right now (basically Hauschka and the two other things I’ve listened to in 2009), whine about things I don’t really like that everyone else does (buzz kids of the week The Pains of Being Pure at Heart), or talk about how underwhelming this year’s Best Picture nominees are.

Here I thought I liked winter… Anyway.

Arthur Russell, Love Is Overtaking Me
Beach House, Devotion
Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago
Chad VanGaalen, Soft Airplane
Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours
Dan Friel, Ghost Town
Deerhunter, Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
Fuck Buttons, Street Horrsing
Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna
Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Hercules & Love Affair, s/t
Los Campesinos!, Hold On Now, Youngster
M83, Saturdays = Youth
Max Tundra, Parallax Error Beheads You
Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, s/t
No Age, Nouns
Sam Amidon, All is Well
The Tallest Man on Earth, Shallow Graves
The Walkmen, You & Me
The War on Drugs, Wagonwheel Blues
White Denim, Exposion
Why?, Alopecia
Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer
Women, s/t

Little Joy,  s/t
The Mae Shi, HLLLYH
The Magnetic Fields, Distortion
Marnie Stern, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is That and That Is That
Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom
The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride
Nat Baldwin, Most Valuable Player
Nico Muhly, Mothertongue
Oneida, Preteen Weaponry
Paavoharju, Laulu Laakson Kukista
Parts & Labor, Receivers
Portishead, Third
School of Language, Sea From Shore
Shearwater, Rook
Subtle, ExitingARM
Sun Kil Moon, April
Thomas Function, Celebration
TV on the Radio, Dear Science
Vampire Weekend, s/t
Vetiver, Thing of the Past
Vivian Girls, s/t
The Week That Was, s/t

At long last, the list begins. To start, some commentary and qualifications.

I’ve had a number of conversations with friends about how 2008 was the year that I (we, in many cases) began to fall out of the popular zeitgeist. A tsunami of press couldn’t convince me I needed to hear Lil Wayne’s album; I’m satisfied with the three Santogold songs I know. I continue to be unmoved and confused by some indie favorites and upstarts, like the Hold Steady, Fleet Foxes, Girl Talk, Frightened Rabbit, Abe Vigoda, Crystal Castles. I get why people like and/or hate Vampire Weekend, but I don’t understand how anyone could take their album so seriously. Okkervil River’s flying off a meta-critical cliff built from Livejournal entries, and only now are people paying attention to them, calling a B-sidesy LP one of their best. That one Lykke Li song I heard was good, the one with the dance beat.

None of this is to say that the albums below define me as any kind of sage alt-bro. An honest representation of my listening habits this year would leave my pure top 10 filled with late ‘07 sad bastard music (Ned Collette’s Future Suture and Phosphorescent’s Pride), along with Department of Eagles, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, Arthur Russell, Chad VanGaalen, the Tallest Man on Earth, Grouper, and a few other worthy entries from ’08s SB canon (with a Wolf Parade thrown in for good measure). 2008 wasn’t a personally traumatic year, but I became interested in (perhaps obsessed with) the idea of comfort in music – how it’s can be created, how it can be expressed, how even terribly depressing albums can offer it thanks to a sheer knack for honesty. For months, it was all I wanted from my headphones. Maybe 2008 was The Year I Edged Closer Towards Dad-Rock, But Demanded Of It Idiosyncrisy and Some Whiff of Authenticity, Thereby Managing to Still Dislike Fleet Foxes. More to the point: I expect as years pass, these lists of mine will get nichier and more eccentric, and I’m more than okay with that.

So, I zipped through the old iTunes library and took note of every album I liked this year. The most general qualification to make it onto at least the Honorable Mentions list is consistency, which to me means that, were I a person with different tastes or proclivities, any of those Honorable Mentions would be a worthy top tenner in some year, in some world. The top 25 that will follow, listed alphabetically, is the group of albums that seriously warranted top 10 consideration. This large number isn’t so much an indication that it was a great year for music, but that it’s pretty-goodness was widespread. Seemingly strong albums I never got around to finishing (for whatever reason) are relegated to the Honorable Mentions, for reasons of authorial integrity. There’ll be notes scattered throughout the HMs, but I intend to come up with something useful to say about everything in the top 25. Hope to have all of this published within a week.

Alina Simone, Everyone is Calling Out to Me, Beware – Impassioned rock/folk covers of work by the Siberian cult hero Yanka Dyagileva.
Black Milk, Tronic
Black Mountain, In the Future – Less tongue-in-cheek than their galvanizing debut, but much more coherent and purposeful. Reviewed here.
Blitzen Trapper, Furr – Dismissed this one after half a listen; half a listen later, I was wrong.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lie Down in the Light – Will Oldham sings!
The Constantines, Kensington Heights – Heroic Canadian rockers seem to have shifted gears, from trying to become one of indie rock’s most blistering acts to merely being one of the most undervalued (and annoyingly slightly inconsistent) rock bands around.
The Cool Kids, The Bake Sale EP – For “BASS!” as bass alone.
Crystal Stilts, Alight of Night – Imagine what this band can achieve once they get a personality.
Department of Eagles, In Ear Park – The most (personally) controversial HM here, I’ve docked it a few points despite its great heights, because it really ought to be four or five songs shorter, and it’s not all that long in the first place. Nonetheless, in a year of too little Grizzly Bear, Daniel Rossen’s project provided a fine substitute.
The Dodos, Visiter – Had I seen the Dodos in concert anytime this year, this would be a nearly surefire top 10; with Visiter, the duo (now a trio, I hear) comes tantalizingly close to realizing the effusive kick of their spartan live show on record.
Faun Fables, A Table Forgotten EP
Flying Lotus, Los Angeles
Hauschka, Ferndorf – New addition! See bottom of this page for a good primer.
High Places, s/t – Despite the album art, I don’t hate this. Its density is almost too light not to love. Almost.
The Hospitals, Hairdryer Peace – Project for 2009: finish this album. Alienating and exhilirating in the simplest of ways.
Islands, Arm’s Way – An unexpected and totally underrated, wild-eyed triumph… after a dozen spins.
Johann Johannson, Fordlandia – My go-to ambient artist, for reasons I’ve yet to make up.
Juana Molina, Un Dia – See “High Places,” except the “almost” part. I’m shocked to see iTunes telling me I’ve listened to this 15 times, so quickly and breezily it flirts by.
Kanye West, 808s and Heartbreaks – Of course Kanye’s first interesting album is his most poorly reviewed. Much better than Graduation, and I think the mere promise of West become a genuine “eccentric artist” in the Prince mode is something to get excited about.
Kathleen Edwards, Asking for Flowers – Reviewed here.
Kingdom Shore, …and all the dogs to shark – Starting to buy into the alarming chaos of this four violin onslaught.

Yes, of Maine is still (not yet) working on the big year-end wrap-up, though it will – despite the glut of (to these ears) Great Albums – be pretty sunshiney, diverse, and hopefully somewhat illuminating.

In the meantime, I’ve seen a few movies. They all had their problems, but some were better than others. Here’s the first one.

Synecdoche, New York (director Charlie Kaufman)

It’s reasonable to guess that Synecdoche is intended to be Kaufman’s magnum opus – after relatively dipping his toes in metaphysics, death, people playing actors playing actors, etc., in previous films (most great: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), Kaufman goes pretty whole hog here – but with a mind this obsessive and restlessly conceptual, it’s hard to say for sure.

And those grand designs actually sort of the problem with Synecdoche. It is: phenomenally acted (by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Emily Watson Samantha Morton (oops), and Michelle Williams, in particular); not nearly as confusing as the reviews make it out to be (the story has its abstract moments, but it’s almost completely linear); fixated on morose issues (death, sickness, loving people you aren’t with); and very well realized (good, sometimes great, set design).

It is also: the apotheosis of Charlie Kaufmanism. Why is this a problem? Because we already know too much about Charlie Kaufman.

Suppose a plot summary is in order. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, an ambitious/pretentious (hard to tell) stage director in the midst of a dying marriage (to Catherine Keener), with child, and what feels like a self-actualizing case of hypochondria. Cotard is surrounded by portents of doom – he sees himself in cartoons on television, his home is soundtrack by blasé readings of international disasters – and tries to “do the right thing” most of the time, but this leaves him morose and wanting. When his wife and child leave him, time in the film begins moving more quickly, spanning decades in about an hour and a half: Cotard wins a MacArthur grant and falls for a box office manager (played by Samantha Morton), and then falls for one of his actresses (Michelle Williams). Cotard sets out to make a play about “everything,” which winds up being a play about anyone and everyone he sees, which then winds up a play about characters portraying himself and the people around him managing the play about everything, and so on and so forth. What begins with good intentions – a sweeping, universal statement, theater at its most direct and pure – becomes increasingly solipsistic. (The set of the play becomes a series of sets within sets; after a while, it’s entirely removed from the outside world, which by the way is falling apart amid riots and some sort of war. Honestly, it’s all pretty neat.)

Synecdoche’s concept is certainly original and (again) well-realized, but too many of its most important tics are familiar. Morton’s character – charming, seductive, a bit dangerous – reminds you of Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine. Keener’s sort of an amalgam of her and Cameron Diaz’s characters in Being John Malkovich, ambitious but frumpy. Hoffman is often as pathetic as Nicolas Cage’s Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, without the funny altar ego. Hoffman’s Cotard Malkoviches himself later in the movie.

The film, while successful in its ambitions, is just too ambitious to be successful. Many critics have written eloquent or even moving reviews of Synecdoche, New York; these reviews invariably praise how “about everything” the film is, about you and everyone around you, how you live and act and judge and so on. It makes for moving prose, but Synecdoche isn’t confident enough in its audacity to go five minutes without hammering those themes to death. Literally. The film won’t leave you thinking about how to live a better life; it’ll leave you glad you’re not living Caden Cotard’s.

Hello all. Be alerted that end-of-year listmaking activities are in progress, and will be posted here…next week? Requiring more effort and self-criticism than expected…

But on that note – and to violate a tenet of this blog – I feel a need to urge my local readers to attend a couple of concerts this weekend, featuring a couple of my favorite artists of 2008.

First up, on Friday night, Sam Amidon’s at One Longfellow Square with my dear friend Cerf-Volantes. I’ve written at length about Amidon’s album here, and written more about a song he sang on another album here, but long story short: his latest album, All is Well – a set of revinvented traditional folk songs – is one of the most beautiful and accomplished albums of 2008. You’d be well served to check this bright young talent out Friday.

Best of all, I just found that the old office auction site is selling “buy it now” tickets at half price right now. Bidding ends at 5 pm on Friday, where you’ll have to get by with the also-worthwhile $10 price.

A couple other fine articles on Sam Amidon’s album, from Stylus and Pitchfork.

On Saturday, upright bassist Nat Baldwin – who served time gigging with Department of Eagles this year – is in town for the winter and playing at Field, on India St. That’s an early one – 6:30 pm – and a cozy evening of string music. I’m sort of co-hosting the show, so we’ll be whipping up some hot chocolate or toddies or something for you, and we ask you donate some cash ($5, ideally) for Mr. Baldwin and the other artists. Baldwin’s 2008 album, Most Valuable Player, has also been getting some Best of 2008 love. Read a nice entry (with 5 mp3s) here at the #4 slot, and here’s my article about the album.

Hope you can make it to one or both. You’ll be glad you did.

Let’s work our way to summarizing comments here. And before I wear you out, if you’re looking for a great beginner’s guide to the awesomeness awaiting you in this book, read Jonathan Lethem’s review.

Left thinking about: the five sections, all somewhat distinctive stylistically, that just end; how we learn everything about the life and nothing about the work of the fictional author that motivates much of this tale; the characters all searching for clues – to the whereabouts of a lost writer, to the murderer(s) of hundreds of young women in northern Mexico, to their sexual and romantic needs and desires, to how to escape squalor and grief, to the importance of identity, to the symbolism of their dreams – which, in many cases, they find and lead to nothing.

Most of all, it’s Bolano’s craft more than his story that resonates. There’s something inherently contradictory about his style. His sentences won’t stop you in your tracks. You won’t find yourself highlighting virtuoso moments very often. He’s not one for adages, morals, or grand statements. His series (plural) of ideas don’t culminate in a-ha moments or philosophical revelations – when they do, they’re usually comically naive.

At the same time, Bolano’s syntax is so distinctive and (more importantly) intuitive that you’re unlikely to forget many of his sentences upon a rereading. If they’re, line by line, unmemorable, they’re a perpetual motion machine of details, asides, and insights. His rhythm is addicting; it’s difficult to stop reading 2666, because you want the high to be the same the moment you jump back in.

Try this two-sentence paragraph out, from “The Part About the Crimes”:

For many days Juan de Dios Martinez thought about the four heart attacks Herminia Noriega had suffered before she died. Sometimes he thought about it while he was eating or while he was urinating in the men’s room at a coffee shop or one of the inspector’s regular lunch spots, or before he went to sleep, just at the moment he turned off the light, or maybe seconds before he turned off the light, and when that happened he simply couldn’t turn off the light and then he got out of bed and went over to the window and looked out at the street, an ordinary, ugly, silent, dimly lit street, and then he went into the kitchen and put water on to boil and made himself coffee, and sometimes, as he drank the hot coffee with no sugar, shitty coffee, he turned on the TV and watched late-night shows broadcast across the desert from the four cardinal points, at that late hour he could get Mexican channels and American channels, channels with crippled madmen who galloped under the stars and uttered unintelligible greetings, and then Juan de Dios Martinez set his coffee cup on the table and covered his face with hands and a faint and precise sob escaped his lips, as if he were weeping or trying to weep, but when finally he removed his hands, all that appeared, lit by the TV screen, was his old face, his old skin, stripped and dry, and not the slightest trace of a tear.

Okay, let’s assume you thought that was awesome. (You were right.) But what happened here? Nothing that didn’t happen in that first, short sentence.

What does that second sentence do to enhance the first one? Emotionally, for Juan de Dios Martinez, almost nothing. His inability to cry is affecting, but all we’re told aside from that is in what settings he’s thinking about Herminia Noriega. Bolano makes no assumptions about Juan’s psyche.

What else do we learn? Indelible tics of Juan’s behavior, things about his daily routine. Bits about Santa Teresa, the fictional city much of the book is set in. Just this broad series of adjectives – “an ordinary, ugly, silent, dimly lit street” – is extremely evocative, and the description of television personalities, “in Spanish or English or Spanglish” speaking “unintelligible greetings,” brings up the murky mélange of life on the border. The not much of this sentence still seems widely encompassing.

It’s one of hundreds of such sequences in 2666. They add up to nothing like a resolution, but they encapsulate generations, cultures, nightmares, and the author’s boundless energy and ambition.

There will never be a Sorry dude. post about Fleet Foxes. That’s one critical consensus we will not be getting behind.

Sorry dude. is (potentially) an occasional column where I apologize for publicly or privately criticizing art that turns out to be pretty good.

I guess I have Kermit the Frog to thank for making me finally appreciate Sound of Silver. Kermie’s video lip synching along to album closer “New York I Love You” (it’s not on YouTube anymore, presumably you can find it elsewhere) was pretty great, but had the consequence of making me appreciate that song a little more and finally giving Sound of Silver a front-to-back listen.

My embarrassing (and, it seems, legendary) reaction to the video, by the way: “…nothing makes me feel as warm inside as a wide-open muppet mouth.”

The consensus pick for the Best Album of 2007, Silver’s first single, “North American Scum,” remains irksomely self-conscious; James Murphy’s lazy drawl is, one supposes, actually intended to sound like the ultimate example of the hipster cliche, but that doesn’t make the schtick funny. Or tolerable. The loud, vaguely unenthusiastic girl harmony backup sends me over the edge every time.

Elsewhere, things are pretty good, and surprisingly consistent and digestible for a longish album made up of nine longish songs. “Time to Get Away” has proven its utility on the dance floor, “Someone Great” and “All My Friends” are legitimately excellent and intelligent pop songs (the latter won me over late last year – not that I told anyone – after I heard this cover by the Main Drag). Ditto the title track and “Kermit I Love You.” “Us v Them” is still annoying though. Anyway, keeping this abbreviated, sorry dude.

p.s. Fingers still crossed that, in ten years, everyone will realize that this was actually the album of ‘07.

It’s been up on the web for a while now, but I finally got around to perusing the NYT’s 100 Notable Books of 2008 yesterday, and was pleased to see Chris Adrian’s recent book of short stories, A Better Angel, on the list. As you may recall, I ditched this blog for a couple months to write a very lengthy review of it (which I may post soon, once I abandon the idea of submitting it to other publications). The title story, one of the better ones in the collection, is freely readable here.

In other news, the Literary Event of the Season is now complete. Commentary coming tomorrow or Wednesday.