Top Somesuch of 2007 (inspired by Nicoloff)

So I've mainly dissed 2007, because I felt that 2007 had dissed me, and I looked forward to a more serene 2008. But I think credit must be given where credit is due. 2007 brought some good things, and in no particular order, they are:

1) The literature of Roberto Bolaño. There was so so very much critical hype around him last year since Natasha Wimmer translated The Savage Detectives into English for the first time, but the hype is all true and deserved. Bolaño wrote poems, novellas, short stories, and epic novels that have the quality I most admire in literature, the capacity to encompass all of life in a relatively minimalist prose style. Bolaño is particularly effective at chronicling the lives of writers–he gets the quiet desperation, the petty rivalries between poets, and the arc of history intersecting with individual writers' lives in perfect pitch.

2) The Holy Mountain is maybe the best movie I've ever seen. I can't even describe it further than that for fear of ruining for those who haven't seen it. Conrad and Brandon and I once stayed up talking 'til morning in our Philly living room, which is when Conrad recommended this movie. The next few days I couldn't remember who had told me about the movie, but I went as if in a trance to the video store to rent it.

3) Insoles in my motorcycle boots. It's like looking tough but walking on little baby pillows!

4) New-found freedom from a psychotic need for academic validation.

5) The Ike and Tina Turner Collection. When Ike died recently, that bastion of taste, the New York Post, ran the headline 'Ike Beats Tina to Death,' which I think pretty much sums up how their musical greatness has been obscured by their biographies. Tina Turner's over-produced , over-blown work from the eighties has also obscured the memory of the music that Ike and Tine once made in the 60's. I think both their later work shows how musically, they just weren't the same without each other. In her Ike and Tina days, Tina's voice was the centerpiece of their act. In Gimme Shelter, the Maysles' brothers documentary about Altamont that focuses mainly on the Rolling Stones, Tina goes on stage and out-performs the Stones by a factor of twenty. Later, Ike and Tina's cover of "Honky Tonk Women" similarly upstages the Stones. Nothing approaches the gut-wrenching rawness of Tina's caterwaling over the Ikettes harmonies in "I Idolize You," or the exuberance of the Phil Spector-produced "River Deep Mountain High." Which is not to gloss over the fact that Ike was utterly physically and psychologically abusive to Tina, or the fact that Tina's separation from Ike may have encouraged many women to break from abusive relationships of their own, but nothing documents the history of their disintegration more viscerally than the albums they made together. By the seventies, Tina's stage banter with Ike is all bile and accusation.

6) The Metropolitan Museum and the cheese pretzels they sell on the steps, as well as the soft-serve ice cream cones that the ice cream man parked at the steps sells late into the night during the spring, summer, and fall. This museum is somewhat overlooked, in favor of some of the city's flashier cultural institutions, but the depth and breadth of what the Met offers is really amazing: Contemporary, Modernist, Asian, Meso-American, Decorative Arts, American, Native American, 17th, 18th, and 19th Century Painting and Portraiture, and the list goes on and on. And they're open until 9:30 during the warmer months. It's really a place to sit and dream and get lost.

7) The Upper East Side. Haters can hate, but I'm sorry–it kind of rooools. The eighties between Lexington and third is home to many great thrift shops, shoe repairs shops run by grizzled old men, bagel places. Lower Manhattan is a shopping mall in which I feel like I am lost in a dystopian future at the most advanced stages of capitalism. Strangely, the UES's affluence has kept it from the crassness that the rest of New York is facing or imminently faces.

8) The poems of Jack Spicer. I had largely been turned off to the San Francisco Renaissance because Robin Blaser was the only one I had read and his work left me decidedly tepid. But Spicer hits you over the head with his strange greatness. The title of this blog is a fragment from "Billy the Kid." I don't know if it's possible to describe in language what Jack Spicer's poems do in my head. And I think that's what's at the root of their genius.

9) (stolen from Nicoloff's list) CHEAPLY PSYCHOANALYZING PEOPLE I BARELY KNOW. YESSSS.

10) When the dancer at the Republican did a routine to"Time after time" and every single person in the joint sang with her. Mid-summer.