Dwelling On Trivial Skirmishes
Now Playing: Nick Drake--"Poor Boy"
Yes, it's one of those "2006 retrospective arts blog posts with an Italian soup recipe" things.

Stracciatella: 3 cups chicken or vegetable stock
(simmer in medium saucepan)
1 large egg
1 1/2 tbsp grated Parmesan cheese
1 tbsp dried breadcrumbs
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1 small clove garlic, minced
(stir mixture rapidly into simmering stock and continue until egg sets, 30-60 secs.)
Ground nutmeg or grated lemon zest (for garnish)

Music: My favorite new album of the year was the long-awaited final release of Clouded Staircase by Starling Electric, my favorite local band, who recently toured with Guided By Voices and can hold their own against any other act in the country, especially now that Sleater-Kinney's broken up. That, by the way, was the most unwelcome musical development of the year. I'd found One Beat to be a little shrill, but understandable given the political winds at the time it was released. It took me a little time to get into The Woods, but once I did, I was eager to see what they'd do next ("What's Mine Is Yours," "Modern Girl," and "Rollercoaster" were magnificent). Though they're no more, they left some great memories, and I salute them anew as the best American musical act of the nineties. I thought outside the music box more last year than at any point in the past five. Much of my musical tastes in Akron came from outside influences (with wonderful results; I owe Pere Ubu, Television, Rocket From The Tombs, pretty much all the pre-punk and new wave stuff to Matt Hiner, and the Super Furry Animals to Matthew Keller). Once I'd discovered the local scene in Ann Arbor, I pretty much delved into area music, exploring whatever took my fancy at house shows and other venues, and only really came up for air last summer. Probably my favorite album of any sort I heard besides Clouded Staircase was The Go! Team's mindblowing Thunder, Lightning, Strike. Honorable, less recent mentions go to Bowie's Hunky Dory (I would drunkenly belt out "Life on Mars?" in the company of others at full blast twice before the year's end--oh, and happy 60th, by the way!), Aimee Mann's thirteen-year-old solo debut Whatever, Margot and the Nuclear So-and-So's with The Dust of Retreat, some of which I heard the year before when they played the Blind Pig, and Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) , which, being released in November 1974, actually shares my own age (highlights: "Mother Whale Eyeless," "The Fat Lady of Limburg," and especially "The True Wheel," on which Eno shares guitar with ex-Roxy Music colleague Phil Manzanera).

Cinema: I've been trying to avoid going to the actual movie theatre for both financial and aesthetic reasons. My boss recently came through on my Go!Pass (which allows certain employees of downtown Ann Arbor businesses free travel on city buses to alleviate the parking situation in the "city center"), so getting to the googolplex will be slightly easier. The days are over when I would go see 24 Hour Party People four times (twice at the Michigan and twice at the State). Most of the movies I saw last year were on DVD. The only three I can remember seeing in the theatre last year were The Descent, Borat and Casino Royale. The first two were okay, and I greatly enjoyed the third. I always thought Craig would do fine (he did), but was disappointed in the somewhat lackluster villain and the sheer wastage of Jeffrey Wright (who usually saves otherwise lugubrious movies like Ride With The Devil and Basquiat or just-plain-unfortunate ones like the Shaft remake from being complete timewasters). The greatest movie I probably saw last year was Visconti's forty-three-year-old The Leopard--a huge visual canvas, majestic scenery, towering performances, and a nifty little twist towards the end that (a) works great and (b) isn't absolutely integral to the plot. Spoiler alert: We do not discover that Burt Lancaster's Prince di Salina is an alien intelligence whose ill-health furstrates his plans to conquer Earth. Many directors, Mr. Shyamalan, think that the twist is the whole point of the movie--I occasionally find Mario Bava tiresome as a result--probably because they hear "twist ending" and think "cool! I'll be compared to Hitchcock!" No.

Literature: Reading is pretty much like eating or drinking--actually, more like breathing--to me, and so I don't think I take as much notice of the books I read as of the purely visual or audio media I ingest, which is something I ought to work on. The best novel I read this year? Angela Carter's Wise Children, published right around her death in 1992, a funny and moving saga of two sisters and their adventures on the stage in 20th century Britain and America. Browsing through the Kiwanis bookshelves one Saturday morning brought me into contact with the hilarious Laurie Notaro, whose The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club, based on the author's experiences as a twenty-something ne'er-do-well in Arizona, was one of the best examples of written humor I'd found since Mike Nelson or David Sedaris. I relearned that reading can be addictive after working through Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo historical fiction series (with refreshingly weird, twisted central characters and supporting cast) of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I can't pass this way, of course, without mentioning the stuff on the British Horror Films forum, particularly the work of Neil Christopher, whose novellas "Test of Faith" (post-apocalyptic trial by ordeal) and "Cerberus Rising" (Cold War werewolves) blew most of the rest of us out of the water. Last but not least, I finally knocked out Robert Hughes' superb biography of Goya (my own favorite visual artist of all time)--as the (rightfully) obsequious book jacket put it, "one genius writing at full capacity about another."

Television: I got a DVD player this year, and have been trolling through the ages...I owned a VCR for over a decade, and only began to buy movies five years or so into that time. I've owned the DVD player for a little under a year, and I already own eleven movies, four individual epsiodes of the old Dr. Who, two seasons of Family Guy (thanks, Slater and Kenissa!) and the complete series of Blackadder the Third and Firefly. Our local library has masses of stuff, too. I've made it through the first series of Deadwood and part of Rome ("Brutus, me old cock!") and am really unsure which of those I prefer--the last scenes of the former's final episode were so beautiful to almost wrench tears. They've also all three series of Father Ted, some of them with commentary from Graham Linehan and Ardal O'Hanlon, which is great. I'm planning to watch the entire Wire at some point to see if it's as good as everyone says it is.

And there'll be more, I'm sure. I mean, "I'm afraid."