Renee's 2011 List of the Best of Everything, Part 1

I had a good year. Well, actually, I didn’t have a great year. Since I got back from Korea, I’ve had a total of four different jobs, none of them being one that I want to stay with permanently. I broke up with my boyfriend of a year and a half. I lost my passport and didn’t get to go to India. I still don’t have a driver’s license. My bedroom is very cold. So what’s been good about this year? Well, I read a lot of good books, watched a lot of great movies, and listened to some truly astonishing music. This is my list of ten of my favorite things I read, watched, or listened to this year. (Note: Not everything on this list was made in 2011, that's just when I was introduced to it.)

10: No One Knows About Persian Cats
Persian Cats, is about love, death, revolution, and… music. Specifically, it’s a movie about music as a means of love, death and revolution. The movie follows two musicians, Negar and Ashkan (recently in prison for playing music banned by strict religious censorship) as they try in a few frantic days to find passports while assembling a band, finding a venue, and gathering a crowd to play a final concert before they leave the country. The movie is a veritable tour-guide of Tehran’s secret music scene. In the two days before the concert, Negar and Askan visit underground jazz dens, rappers in abandoned high-rise construction sites, ten-piece traditional mystic bands in countryside apple orchards. Throughout the whole movie, Negar and Ashkan sing their own songs, quiet indie-rock that is wispy, plaintive, and bittersweet. I watched this movie just before the Arab Spring started with a suicide in Tunisia. Later on during the summer, Iranian students would be shot during protests in Tehran. Two years before any of this happened, Persian Cats showed a secret revolution happening underneath, where young musicians risked their lives simply to play music both soft and sad. 

9. Reading Lolita in Tehran

If No One Knows About Persian Cats is a movie about music as an act of revolution Reading Lolita is about reading as an act of revolution. The book takes place just after the Iranian Revolution of the early eighties; Author Azar Nafisi tells about reading banned western literature with a private class of eight female former students.  She talks about how each book they read affects their view of themselves, the regime they live in, their hopes and dreams for the future.  What I loved most about the book is the way that Azar writes about books. Books to her become almost living beings with the power to break down, elevate, and change a person. The way she writes about books is both reverent and passionate, and reading about reading becomes a euphoric, transfixing experience through this book.

8. Poetry

Poetry the movie unfolds itself a bit like a poem. The movie follows an aging female Alzheimers patient whose grandson is accused of a horrific crime; meanwhile she begins taking a poetry class. Plot-wise, the movie does not sound very exciting, but the main character has such a desperate search for meaning, inspiration, beauty in the midst of her own mind fading into obscurity and her world collapsing. Some of the movie you just watch the main character stare up at the sunlight filtering through trees searching for words. In these still, monotonous acts there's such a pressing urgency for significance underneath them, it leaves you almost breathless with anticipation.


7. Secret Garden and Phineas and Ferb

Hyun Bin <3 'nuff said. 

My sister often teases me for books I read or the movies I watch. Every time I want to watch something with her she asks me, "Is it like the stuff you normally watch? Am I going to have to comfort you afterwards? Are there any refugees in this movie? On a scale of one to pretentious, just how pretentious is this movie?" She pauses, "Actually, I probably don't want to watch this with you." It is true that I gravitate toward the more heady stuff, but I also love (and need!) pure escapist fun. My go to for that this year was Secret Garden, a South Korean body-swap melodrama. It was cheesy, it was predictable, it was girly, and oh my goodness, it was fun. I watched all sixteen hour-long episodes in about three days. I'm embarrassed by it now, but if I had the time to watch a bumbling a Joo Won woo Gil Ra Im while he was trapped in her body... well, I might not be able to help myself from doing it again.

Phineas and Ferb is my latest television love. I was talking to a friend about it the other day and he said, "I can't imagine any other show that has the exact same formula happen every episode still feel fresh and funny like Phineas and Ferb does." I guess it's hard to go wrong when the formula involves crazy inventions, crime-fighting platypusses, and elaborate expository song-and-dance numbers. And also, the coolest theme song known to man.

6. The King is Dead
I listened to this album so many times this year, that one night I went to sleep and literally dreamed myself sitting in a room listening to this album. And you know what? That was a pretty awesome dream. I don't want to say too much about this album because I'm a little bit of the opinion that analyzing music too much takes away from some of the mystical ways that it connects to people. Also, my words of description on how beautiful and affecting this album is seem paltry in comparison to the music itself. I will say the usual note about the Decemberists that their lyrics are ridiculously literary and complex. Who else uses words like "Andalusian" and "Bonhomie" in their songs? Listen with a tissue in one hand and a dictionary in the other.

Part two coming on Friday!
PS: What are your favorite books/movies/tvshows/music from the year?

Into The Woods

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” –Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I went to the park--the woods, alas, being very far away, and the park being very near. It was beautiful and empty, and at one moment I lay on my back in the middle of a golf course with winters frozen yellow grass penetrating through my sweater and into my skin, staring at the smear of sky and the barren gray tendrils of the tops of trees. At that moment, the park transcended its status as park, removed itself and me from the decay of the city, and, if only for a moment, became the “woods” I was seeking--because this morning I woke up with the lines from a Decemberist’s song repeating in my head:
“Big Mountain, wide river,
There’s and ancient pull.
These tree trunks, these stream beds,
leave our bellies full.”
I went to the woods, because my belly feels empty. I wanted something to fill my empty chasms.

 I am alone a lot during the day. I try to find a way to escape from my loneliness. I demand to be distracted from the unsettledness of being alone, so I find another person to talk to, I read, I watch movies, I sleep, or (lately) I glut myself with the internet. These past few weeks, I’ve felt like I’m living a half-life. I find myself almost daily in an internet fugue-state that I try to snap myself out of. A voice keeps calling to me saying, “arise, oh sleeper, rise from the dead.” And “awake, my soul.” I feel myself faltering, though, at a loss to know how to arise, how to awake my soul.

Today though, I chose to be alone. Rather, I chose to be in solitude. I’ve always tried to draw a distinction between being alone and being in solitude. Being alone is often something I have no choice over, being in solitude is something I choose into. In aloneness, I seek to end my isolation. In solitude, I use the quietness of my isolation to connect to something eternal. Being alone makes me want people to rescue me, distract me. Being in solitude makes me think about how I can connect better to other people. Being alone makes me want to escape; being in solitude is itself an escape.

There were no words spoken this morning. I sat on a ledge and watched a red cardinal flit through the tangled branches of leafless trees. The gray clouds moved like a city crowd, each personality emerging; here one is menacing, aggressive; here one is demure and sad. Brown leaves curled upward on the ground, their frozen tips like fingers trying to grasp the sky. I thought about Jesus telling people not to babble in prayer, thinking their many words could save them. I thought about my feelings of remoteness, of my desperate want to fill my silences with noise.  I wondered if one could pray without talking, could pray simply by staring out in the static silence of the winter air.

I went to the woods to pray.