Best and Worst of 2013
On a personal level I couldn't wait for 2013 to end. I never
suffered from triskaidekaphobia before (your first vocabulary word for 2014!),
but the past year sucked–3 family deaths, friends who lost loved ones, messy
divorces (not for me, thank goddess), and a bout with shingles. In all, 2013
flat out sucked! But there was joy and fortune as well. In that mixed spirit, I
shift to the cultural level to select the best and worst of 2013.
Music
Album of the Year:
Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, Fire
& Fortune. It’s not often someone gets billed as the “next Sandy Denny”
and lives up to it, but Ms. Clarke is a rare talent whose voice is as strong
and clear as it is beautiful. Even if she flames out entirely, though, this
record will stand on its own merits.
Heather Maloney’s
self-titled album is a worthy runner-up.
Worst Album of the
Year: Antonio Loureiros, Só. It’s
not inept, just meandering and shapeless, as if the musician was unaware of
anyone other than himself.
Best Concert(s) of
the Year: 2013 was a terrific year for live shows. Shows by Ellis Paul,
Alisdair Fraser, and Genticorum were stunning, but I’m going to cop out and
declare a tie between Richard Thompson and
Richard Shindell. Thompson’s solo
acoustic show at the Calvin Theater in September was hard to beat. He’s
classified as a folk-rocker, but the man rocks even when he sings a lullaby
(which the dark RT never does, unless
the tale ends badly). As a guitarist he’s nonpareil.
I saw Richard
Shindell twice last year, once at the Iron Horse in February, and again at
the Signature Sounds Parlor Room. I don’t know what occurred at the Horse, but when
he showed up at the Parlor Room in September, he went on and on about how he
preferred playing there. At the
Parlor Room he played with freeness and freshness I hadn’t heard in a while;
he even cracked a few jokes, which is rare as a supermodel gobbling a grinder.
What a show!
Worst Concert of
the Year: The Calvin
Theater, November: Great Big Sea. Okay,
GBS is enjoying a breakout in its 20th year. It has legions of
adoring fans who’d listen to them fart. My standard is that if you can’t bother
to enunciate, don’t do a sound check, adopt a rock persona but only strike the
pose and not the notes, you get no love from me. A huge boo hiss! to the
Calvin. Would someone please send venue owner Eric Suher the memo that there is
no excuse for bad sound in the 21st century.
Books
Best Novel of the
Year: T’was a good year for novels, but the one I enjoyed most was from
Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins. Set amidst the contrasting splendor and squalor of
the Amalfi Coast in the early 60s, Walter explores the beauty and the sadness of
all manner of ruins–buildings, careers, love affairs, and lives.
A not-so-distant runner-up is The Death of Bees by Lisa
O’Donnell, a tale of two teenaged Glasgow girls trying to hide their
parents’ death so they can be together. It is, at once, heartbreaking and
inspiring.
Worst Novel of the
Year: There’s lots of utter rubbish
published each year, so my low bar is books that should have been contenders;
that is, wasted material. I declare a tie between The Celestials by Karen
Shepard and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. How do make a story of
19th century Chinese immigrants into a snowy New England mill town ordinary?
Focus on an imagined Victorian romance with an exceedingly dull woman at the
center.
Other writers adored Atkinson’s story of a girl who is born,
dies, and is reborn onto a new life path. It has its moments, but it’s the most over-hyped novel of the year. The central hook is a contrivance and the
won’t-stay-dead character at its center is passive and uninteresting in most of
her reincarnations.
Best Academic Book
of the Year: Kudos to Andrew
Erdman for Queen of Vaudeville,
the fascinating story of Eva Tanguay–perhaps the most famous star you’ve never
heard of. It’s an engagingly written book that makes us feel the burning
spotlights, smell the floorboard dust, and long to throttle the ones who abuse or
waste talent.
Worst Academic
Book of the Year: There’s no way to choose just one, so I won’t name
names. The truth is that most academics could put readers to sleep whilst scrawling
“This End Up” on a cardboard box.
Movies
This is always a tough one. Those of us who don’t live in LA
or New York don’t even get to see most of the films that will get Oscar
nominations until the calendar flips. My list contains films actually viewed in
the cinema, regardless of how Hollywood regards their release date.
Best American Film
of the Year: Give Weir’s Oscar (Woscar?) to Nebraska, a film that does for this generation
what The Last Picture Show did in the
1970s. Still believe in the American Dream? Take a trip to Hawthorne, NB and
get back to me. Bruce Dern wrings more emotion from being quiet than a cascade
of Hollywood contrived speeches.
Best Foreign Film
of the Year: The best
thing I saw all year, by a wide margin, was the French film Amour.
What would you do for love? It’s what you’d do in the final days that
really count. Jean Louis Trintignat will break your heart with a performance in
which small actions speak louder than words.
Worst American
Film of the Year: Again,
there’s so much drivel that my vote goes to a film that seeks to do something
important and does it badly. Lots of people loved Silver Linings Playbook,
but the ridiculous football subthemes trivialized what should have been centered on how
society makes it hard for people whose social disorders to
fit in. Star Trek: Into Darkness was
also a big disappointment. What? All that money and they couldn’t hire someone
to write a script that wasn’t a remake of The Wrath of Khan?
Best Independent
Film of the Year: No
God, No Master looks at the Red Scare of the 1920s from the point of
view of an agent seeking to stymie the anarchist bombings, even though he hates
some of their targets. David Strathairn stars in the movie that is what J Edgar should have been.
Worst Independent
Film of the Year: It pains
me to say it as it was shot locally and has people I know in it, but Names
on the Bridge by Elizabeth
Foley is such a mess that it’s the worst film I saw in 2013–bar none.
Best Video Rental:
I missed Cloud
Atlas in the theater, mostly because the novel underwhelmed me. The
film is miles better–an intelligent look at the interconnectedness of lives
past, present, and future. It’s a head scratcher in places, but you’ll think
about it long after it’s over.
The most surprising video was Robert Redford’s smart The
Company You Keep, an
unapologetic look at the lives of ‘60s revolutionaries 40 years out. This one
is a neo-con’s nightmare, but it was a sweet dream for me.
Worst Video Rental:
The 1969 James Mason film The Age of Consent weathers as well
as a pair of papier-mâché tennis shoes.
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