I Had Too Much to Dream Last Year

2001 wasn't a great year for the people who own movie studios and—especially—movie theaters, but then, it also wasn't much of a year for most mainstream filmgoers over 12. It's almost certain that 2001's three top-grossing movies will be Shrek, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and Monsters, Inc.—all kiddie flicks, two of them 'toons. Christmas always brings a major crop of "adult" films, but to judge by the fate of such fare earlier this year, most of them will fade quickly.

Of course, fading quickly isn't what it used to be. Thanks to superwide releases, which put heavily promoted movies on thousands of screens at once, would-be blockbusters can make a fortune in their first weekend, possibly even paying for themselves before audiences realize that all they're buying is hype. The stultifying A.I. Artificial Intelligence, for example, did big business at first, before fatal word of mouth began to circulate. Essentially, a megamarketed film has become a pay-for-view event that you have to leave home to see. That's profitable for the studios that can presell a mediocre movie as a major happening, but it means that even the biggest films vanish in a matter of weeks. Second thoughts and sleeper hits are banished to video.

For filmmakers without killer clout (or ad budgets), it might be better to stay on the art-house circuit. The winningly energetic and visually witty (if indifferently plotted) Josie and the Pussycats disappeared from theaters even as its pop-punk soundtrack continued to sell, suggesting that a new marketing campaign might have given it a second life. Meanwhile, the overrated but undeniably intriguing Memento lingered for months, at least in brainy-demographic markets such as Washington. Hollywood's one-size-fits-all strategy still rules, but the city's art and repertory theaters—notably Visions Cinema Bistro Lounge, which turned over new films breathlessly—provided dozens of interesting alternatives, including most of the year's best movies.

If there was a recurring theme this year, it was expressed by the title of Waking Life, or what a character in Vanilla Sky labels "vivid dream." The movies were full of charismatic young men lost in some sort of fog, whether it was short-term-memory loss (Memento again), schizophrenia (A Beautiful Mind), erotic obsession (Suzhou River), or a stark-raving-mad society (Our Lady of the Assassins). In some cases, entering the reverie was largely a matter of submitting to a godlike director's perverse logic, as in David Lynch's ominous but ultimately goofy Mulholland Drive, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's too-labored-to-be-entirely-charming Amélie, Alejandro González Iñárritu's dog-eat-dog Amores Perros, Takashi Miike's dating nightmare Audition, or Tsui Hark's dazzling yet soulless Time and Tide, perhaps the trippiest Hong Kong action movie ever made.

My own best-of list, I noticed in compiling it, contains no films about men in dreamscapes and many about women in the real world. This is in part because of two remarkable Iranian films, The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman, that introduce a certifiable trend: Next year we should see at least two Iranian films about Afghan women, Baran and Kandahar. Women also took a guiding role in another art-house trend that couldn't have less to do with Iran: the sexually explicit downer. This category includes Fat Girl; Wayne Wang's The Center of the World, which fails to deliver on an intriguing premise; Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-Moie which offers provocation-for-the-hell-of-it fucking and killing; and Patrice Chéreau's aptly named Intimacy, a bracing film that deserves better than to get lost in the year-end flurry of releases. (It opens Dec. 26 at Visions.)

As usual, my top 10 is alphabetical and comprises movies that debuted in Washington this year. It thus can include films that debuted elsewhere in 2000, yet none of the many movies opening in late 2001 in New York and L.A. but not appearing here until 2002. The list of Oscar-courting New York– and L.A.–only November and December releases seems to get longer each year, and this time it includes Gosford Park, Behind the Sun, Piñero, The Devil's Backbone, I Am Sam, Charlotte Gray, Baran, Kandahar, Last Orders, Iris, Black Hawk Down, Lantana, Monster's Ball, and Italian for Beginners.

The Circle Jafar Panahi's feminist La Ronde follows Tehran women on a nonlinear course, matching naturalistic performances and techniques to an exacting structure.

The Day I Became a Woman Working from a scenario by her husband, leading Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Marzieh Meshkini offers not only a tour of Iranian womanhood but also a quick survey of Iranian cinema and society.

Faithless In Liv Ullmann's bruising film, Ingmar Bergman's private contemplation of a long-ago affair blossoms into a rich portrait of his former lover, embodied by Lena Endre in an unflinching performance.

Fat Girl Not another teen movie, Catherine Breillat's savage tale of two sisters at the beach tops a brutally candid depiction of a cad's seduction with a stunningly unexpected ending.

Ghost World Based on Daniel Clowes' comic book, Terry Zwigoff's first fiction film is a fresh, smart dispatch from the overlapping zombie universes of soulless suburbia and late adolescence.

The House of Mirth Terence Davies' impeccable adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel is perhaps the most chilling account of social climbing ever.

In the Mood for Love Nominally the tale of a friendship that may or may not have become adultery, Wong Kar-Wai's film is a sumptuous evocation of the vanished world of his Hong Kong childhood.

Our Song Jim McKay's loose, naturalistic tale of three teenage girls in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is simple and unforced yet emotionally profound.

Va Savoir This cerebral yet playful French sex farce is a minor film by the standards of director Jacques Rivette, but it charmingly balances intellectual concerns with a boisterous comic finale.

Yi Yi (A One and a Two) Edward Yang's latest Taipei story focuses on one family but portrays an entire world, following threads of everyday lives while musing on the purpose of art.

There were many other films I enjoyed or admired, at least in part, but only a handful that really grabbed me despite being significantly flawed: the previously mentioned Josie and the Pussycats, Time and Tide, Audition, Takeshi Kitano's Brother (which seemed smart when it kept its English-language mouth shut), Shinji Aoyama's brooding Eureka (which needed to lose an entire subplot), Jonathan Nossiter's Signs & Wonders (which featured a muddled thriller payoff it neither needed nor could make work), Tran Anh Hung's The Vertical Ray of the Sun (which was so big on atmosphere that its shortchanged the story), and Barry Levinson's Bandits (the year's funniest mainstream Hollywood picture, even if it was ultimately too long and too timid).

It was a good year for reissues, with reprises of such rarely (or never) seen films as Band of Outsiders, Billy Liar, The Blue Angel, Bob le Flambeur, Once Upon a Time in China I and II, The Wide Blue Road, and Apocalypse Now Redux (though the last is more of a remix than a reissue). Although attendance slipped a bit after Sept. 11, the city's noncommercial repertory programs provided a wealth of worthy retrospectives—including the programs on Kon Ichikawa, Ermanno Olmi, Sergei Paradjanov, Jacques Tati, Valerio Zurlini, and Merchant-Ivory—and festivals—including Filmfest DC, Reel Affirmations, the Washington Jewish Film Festival, Arabian Sights, the Asian Pacific American Film Festival, and annual roundups of new films from Germany, Hong Kong, Turkey, Latin America, and the European Union.

Thanks in large part to Visions, fewer foreign and indie films are restricted to one- or two-time D.C. screenings, but the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the American Film Institute, the Freer Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theater, Films on the Hill, and the various festivals still offer plenty of exclusives. Among the notable new films they debuted this year were Takashi Kitano's Sonatine, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Mortal Transfer, Johnny To's Needing You, Ah Nian's Call Me, Don Boyd's My Kingdom, Jiang Wen's Devils on the Doorstep, Rajiv Menon's I Have Found It, Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, and Nagisa Oshima's Taboo. The last is scheduled for a February encore, and with any luck we'll see more of them return. With these venues in operation, it's no great annoyance to cede the multiplexes to the under-12s. CP

Corporate Film Still Sucks

I spent 2001 hiding from Hollywood, begging my editor to assign me independent and foreign films. The handful of mainstream commercial movies that I got stuck with turned out to be snoozers or stinkers: The Mexican, The Gift, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Evolution, America's Sweethearts, The Others, The Glass House, and Ocean's Eleven. But the 75 films I reviewed this year yielded more than enough non-Tinseltown productions worthy of inclusion in a 10-best list. Some of my selections might seem willfully obscure, but I'm confident that they will be remembered and enjoyed a decade from now.

Two choices stand out from the rest. The film I most admired was Iranian director Jafar Panahi's The Circle. Panahi combines episodes from the lives of an assortment of unrelated female characters to depict and indict the crushing constraints imposed on women from cradle to grave by fundamentalist Iran's repressive patriarchic laws and traditions. Almost entirely shot in actual locations, The Circle balances a neo-documentary style with its filmmaker's formalist strategies, including complex, extended camera movements, visual motifs, and thematic modulations. The Circle opens on a despairing note and grows increasingly depressive and, occasionally, excessively melodramatic. Its cumulative force is devastating. Although a difficult film to experience—we watch appalled but powerless to alleviate the plight of women in a society immune to outside intervention—The Circle is a politically courageous and artistically resourceful achievement. Unsurprisingly, it was banned in its home country.

The Low Down, featured in the now-defunct Shooting Gallery series, is the movie that gave me the most pleasure last year. British writer-director Jamie Thraves' feature debut modestly depicts a few weeks in the lives of a circle of 20-something London friends caught in limbo between leaving college and making adult professional and personal commitments. Thraves presents a series of vignettes that, considered separately, would appear to be arbitrarily chosen, seemingly improvised slices-of-life: dinner-party conversations, workplace flare-ups, drunken pub crawls. But a pattern emerges from these apparently random moments that comes together in a poetic, open-ended denouement. Aidan Gillen never makes a false move as Frank, an art-school graduate unsatisfied with his life but uncertain how and where to begin changing it. Kate Ashfield is equally convincing as the soft-spoken, vulnerable real estate agent who tries to break through his inertia. Cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo's restless, often handheld camera becomes part of the action, an engaged participant rather than a detached observer. His airy images complement Thraves' freewheeling style, inspired by the early French New Wave films of Godard and Truffaut. Although small in scale and devoid of earthshaking themes, The Low Down is a little gem of a movie, as richly satisfying as a perfectly executed watercolor or poem.

English writer-director Terence Davies, who built his reputation with two dark, painstakingly wrought autobiographical mood pieces, Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The Long Day Closes, emphasizes pathos over social satire in his adaptation of the 1905 Edith Wharton novel, The House of Mirth, which mocked the self-indulgence and callousness of New York's upper classes while charting the irreversible decline of Lily Bart, a striking young woman lacking the means to survive in a milieu where money alone confers status. Davies conflates and, in some cases, omits some of Wharton's secondary characters, but his uncompromising style remains intact: measured pacing, formalized camera movements, painterly compositions, and protracted exploration of faces. Although Gillian Anderson lacks Lily's spellbinding beauty and occasionally struggles with Wharton's faithfully transposed dialogue, she connects with the character's plight so profoundly that, by the film's climax, she puts to rest reservations about her casting. Davies' austere style lacks the sparkle of the novel's prose, but viewers willing to adjust their inner clocks to his deliberate tempo will be rewarded with passages of uncommon emotional intensity.

After 36 years as a largely decorative screen presence, Charlotte Rampling emerges as a world-class actress in Under the Sand, an ambiguous French drama directed and co-scripted by François Ozon. Rampling plays Marie, a Parisian literature professor contentedly married for 25 years to an older intellectual. During a summer vacation, she awakens from a seaside nap to find that her husband has disappeared. Returning to Paris, she resumes her customary routine, refusing, despite friends' attempts to penetrate her denial, to accept his absence, imagining that he's still with her at the breakfast table and in bed. Trim and glamorous at 55, Rampling appears in nearly every shot. Photographed without makeup, often in silent close-ups, she embodies Marie's suppressed grief so eloquently that we're convinced we can read her thoughts. Ozon, one of France's most transgressive young filmmakers, curbs his customary impulse to shock in Under the Sand, leaving viewers with an enigmatic fadeout that compassionately declines to seal Marie's fate.

In When Brendan Met Trudy, his feature debut, Irish director Kieron J. Walsh, working from an original screenplay by novelist Roddy Doyle, revitalizes romantic comedy while paying homage to the filmmakers he admires. Trim, clean-cut Brendan (Peter McDonald), a shy, bored Dublin teacher, has two after-school obsessions—singing and cinema. His humdrum world turns upside down when, fresh from a choir rehearsal, he meet Trudy (Flora Montgomery), an effervescent young woman with a longshoreman's vocabulary and a taste for no-brainer American action pictures. United by sexual attraction but separated by taste, the pair embark on a rib-rattling erotic affair, overcast by Trudy's forced confession that she supports herself by robbing houses. Walsh rounds out this unusually lively comedy by intercutting and occasionally restaging scenes from Sunset Boulevard, The Quiet Man, Stagecoach, and other screen classics to illustrate how Trudy's volatile influence transforms Brendan's drab life into a thrilling real-life movie.

Spanish director Fernando Trueba defines the aim of his Calle 54 as "primarily to share a musical banquet with anyone who is ready for it." Trueba selected a dozen Latin jazz groups featuring musicians hailing from Brazil, Spain, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, and the United States, then shot complete performances, ranging from five to 10 minutes, in a New York studio. Backed by vibrantly colored cycloramas, these artists blend the musical traditions of their homelands (flamenco, samba, rumba, tango, mambo) with the improvisatory freedom of American jazz. The savory courses of this banquet range from virtuosic piano pieces by Michel Camilo and Chucho Valdés to uninhibited ensembles led by the late vibraphonist-timpanist Tito Puente, percussionist Orlando "Puntilla" Ríos, multireed player Paquito D'Rivera, and composer Chico O'Farrill. One of the most satisfying music films ever made, Calle 54—ends with a touching sequence, a lyrical piano duet by Valdés and his father, Bebo Valdés, reunited after a five-year separation.

Compulsively gripping and artfully crafted, George Butler's documentary The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, based on Caroline Alexander's 1998 best-selling book, is indebted to the work of another filmmaker for much of its impact. Frank Hurley, hired by explorer Ernest Shackleton to record his 1914 mission to cross the Antarctic continent on foot, shot still photographs and silent footage that Butler incorporates to achieve an otherwise unattainable sense of realism. Butler tints and blends these images with contemporary footage of Antarctica, paintings, drawings, and other graphic material, in a collage technique mirrored by the narration, thoughtfully spoken by Liam Neeson and interspersed with other actors' readings from the ship's logs, and the crew's letters and journals, along with reflections by the seafarers' descendants. Although The Endurance documents a failed quest, it celebrates the triumph of courage and ingenuity in the face of almost unimaginable obstacles.

Sexy Beast, the first feature by British director Jonathan Glazer and the screenwriting team of Louis Mellis and David Scinto, offers a fresh, fast-paced, darkly funny twist on a classic underworld plot, filled with double and triple crosses and capped by a sardonically clever coda. English gangster Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), retired to a hillside home on Spain's Costa del Sol with his adoring ex-porno-star wife, is startled by the sudden appearance of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a psychotic former criminal associate dispatched by a gangland boss to bring Gal back home for one more job: a complicated bank heist. Gal's resolute refusal results in an explosive showdown that leaves him no option but to return to England. Glazer employs the technical skills he's refined in making commercials and music videos to visualize the screenplay's contrasting worlds of good and evil: the sunstruck Spanish coast and London's shadowy underbelly. Although the movie's moral scheme is allegorically simple, its presentation is quite sgphisticated, a state-of-the-art display of stylized camerawork, dynamic editing, and inspired acting.

Thirty-three-year-old Thomas, the protagonist of Thomas in Love, French director Pierre-Paul Renders' futuristic comedy-drama, is an agoraphobe who has not left his apartment, or permitted anyone to enter it, for eight years. He communicates with the outside world through his "visiophone"—a combination Internet monitor and video telephone. Among others, he interacts with his worried mother, his disability insurance agent, his psychiatrist, and a compu-porn animated Web site. At the insistence of his shrink, he logs on to an Internet dating service and has a fling with an eccentric young woman. (The pair don cybersex stimulation suits.) After this potential relationship tanks, Thomas reluctantly submits to his insurance man's suggestion that he take advantage of a government-run prostitution Web site. There he encounters lovely, melancholy Eva (Aylin Yay, in a knockout performance). Stalking her through cyberspace, he discovers that she shares his fear and alienation, and she tempts him to return to the real world. Until the film's final shot, we are restricted to seeing only what Thomas observes on his visiophone—a strategy that imposes a number of technical challenges. Renders and screenwriter Philippe Blasband turn these restraints to their advantage, creating a one-of-a-kind movie that satirizes evolving communication technologies while developing a narrative that subtly darkens from comedy to pathos.

Although English writer-director Christopher Nolan won kudos for Memento, a thriller told backward, I was more impressed by his 1998 debut feature, Following, which premiered in D.C. in 2001. Unlike the startling opening shots of Memento, which establish Nolan's inverted time line, Following's early sequences are deceptively straightforward. Bill (Jeremy Theobald), a scruffy, unemployed would-be writer, spends his idle days shadowing strangers. Well-dressed, self-assured Cobb (Alex Haw), aware that he's being tailed, confronts Bill, reveals that he's a burglar, and invites his stalker to accompany him on his next job, the robbery of a woman's apartment. Subsequently, Bill encounters and falls for the same woman, a gangster's moll. At this point, Following begins twisting time into pretzel knots. Nolan gradually exposes a sinister subtext underpinning Bill's story, in which the hapless slacker discovers that he's become an unwitting pawn in a more insidious plot than he could possibly invent or imagine. Shot in 16 mm black-and-white on 20 weekends spaced over a year, Following relies too heavily on musty content—recycled '40s film-noir clichés—but Nolan's masterful technique keeps trumping our expectations until the final frame.

Honorable mentions: Henry Bromell's Panic, featuring William H. Macy as a 40ish hit man in the grip of a midlife crisis. Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort, about a Russian expatriate and her young son seeking political asylum in a decaying British seaside resort. Dominik Moll's With a Friend Like Harry, a sub-Hitchcockian thriller about a murderous sociopath who invades the lives of a middle-class family. Scott McGehee and David Siegel's The Deep End, an inferior but absorbing remake of Max Ophüls' 1949 The Reckless Moment. Brad Anderson's Happy Accidents, an offbeat, time-tripping romantic comedy. Michael Cuesta's L.I.E., about a disaffected adolescent's relationship with a pedophile in a Long Island suburb. And three films that premiered at this year's Reel Affirmations festival: Sebastien Lifshitz's moody, erotic Come Undone, Todd Stephens' picaresque comedy-drama Gypsy 83, and Susan Seidelman's frothy gender-bending farce Gaudi Afternoon, featuring a deliciously cranky Judy Davis.

Some memorable performances: Catherine Deneuve's luminous, world-weary turn as a jeweler's widow in Place Vendôme. Clive Owen's and Helen Mirren's star power in the otherwise formulaic comedy Greenfingers. Child actress Kelly Endresz Banlaki's sensitive work as a '50s Hungarian refugee in An American Rhapsody. Robert Forster and Donnie Wahlberg's ebullient teamwork in Diamond Men. And Stockard Channing's and Julia Stiles' dynamic jousts for dominance in The Business of Strangers.

In a year that began with the bad vibes of the presidential election and got progressively worse, I don't want to contribute to the pervasive gloom by concluding with a list of lousy films—except to say that Jacob and Josh Kornbluth's misbegotten Haiku Tunnel, the worst movie I've seen in 35 years as a reviewer, is to be avoided at all costs. CP

My Life With the Dogs

Did you hear about the blond couple who froze to death at the drive-in?
They went to see Closed for Winter.

What did the fish say when he hit a concrete wall?
'Dam.'

The above jokes—which make me laugh every time—are an appropriate introduction to the year's worst cinematic disasters for the following reasons: (1) The first is my favorite movie-related joke, (2) both indicate that I'm easily amused, and (3) the punch line of the second has typically been my reaction when I learn of the films I've been assigned to review. It's been a dismal year at the movies, from disappointing summer fare (how do you make Pearl Harbor boring?) to so-so independents and foreign films that have been successful simply because people are tired of feeling so bad (Amélie? Cute, but about 20 minutes too long). Then there are the no-name, no-plot groaners that I get stuck with, this year's unusually high number of which is attributable to either frantic green-lighting during the threat of a writers' strike or my getting old. I've had to sit through the worst of the worst, ranging from so-bad-they're-funny to so-bad-I'm-pissed. According to the numbers, many of you have wisely avoided this dreck at the theaters, but let this serve as a warning that the worst 10 movies of 2001 do not even a Blockbuster night make.

I started to rank these in order of hatefulness, with No. 1 being the, um, lowest, but after the first few the badness is pretty much uniform:

1. Tomcats A group of undesirable guys doing undesirable things to way-too-desirable-for-them women. In other words, Penthouse Forum come to life. Oh, and Jerry O'Connell and Jake Busey are the slimiest leading men ever.

2. Say It Isn't So A heartfelt story about the trials faced when one sleeps with his sister. (Let's hope no one sat in the theater thinking, It's funny because it's true!) And could someone please tell me how Chris Klein broke into Hollywood?

3. 3000 Miles to Graceland You get Vegas, you get cool criminals, you get Elvis. Yet this seeming sure shot quickly degenerates into as much of an unsightly mess as a bloated, hopped-up King after too many peanut-butter-and-nanner sandwiches. Kevin Costner—I could stop right here, couldn't I?—plays the baddest Elvis of a gang of five thievin' impersonators, and once the rather stylish casino robbery ends and the rampant bloodshed begins, you simply count down the minutes until all the Elvii have finally left the building.

4. See Spot Run Drug busts and severed testicles—but for kids! Even the sight of David Arquette covered in dog doo isn't worth the price of a rental.

5. Glitter The most reasonable explanation for Mariah Carey's emotional breakdown.

6. Sweet November Keanu Reeves as a mover-and-shaker ad exec? Please. And with all due respect to Charlize Theron's loveliness, you just can't act that crazy and still get the guy. A restraining order, maybe. (Then again, perhaps it's hard for a guy to find someone who also enjoys walking on the beach to Enya.) This 30-days-of-love-therapy cheesefest—complete with the revealing of terminal-illness secrets—is so leaden that it even takes away your ability to enjoy Reeves' bumbling attempts to emote toward the end.

7. Summer Catch You think watching an entire baseball game on TV is boring? You'll never find less exciting play—on or off the field—than in this Freddie Prinze Jr.–led rip-off of Bull Durham, which ends with Prinze's full-of-promise pitcher abandoning a no-hitter to go after the girl—with the smiling support of his teammates. Worst...ending...2ever.

8. AntiTrust Though Ryan Phillippe's golden curls and empty, pretty face were much better suited to the flesh fair that was 54, it's kind of fun to watch him concentrating really hard as he connects the dots in this Bill Gates–gone–bad anti-thriller. But Phillippe as Super Genius, Tim Robbins as Evil Computer Man, and Claire Forlani as the Most Boring Girlfriend Ever ultimately leave you feeling that the only dangers awaiting Phillippe are carpal tunnel syndrome and eyestrain.

9. Shallow Hal I'm not sensitive, and I'm not large, but this is one insulting movie. You've got men whose jackassery prevents them from seeking any but the most stunning women and women who are judged by looks alone, but in the end it's the gals who are pitied and deemed in need of rescue.

10. The Wedding Planner OK, so a lot of my female friends liked this fluff about the loneliest wedding planner of them all. I was game until Jennifer Lopez—looking as Jennifer Lopez does—gives up on finding love after one rejection and decides to agree to an arranged marriage with a cousin she previously couldn't stand, thinking it's her only way to happiness. Way to role-model, J. Lo.

But, as I said, I'm easily amused. So even when I walk out of an assigned movie thinking that maybe I should grab one of those Work at Home! fliers on the way to the Metro, I can find something worthwhile amid the film's awfulness to make up for my trauma. In an effort to put a positive spin on this year's collection of otherwise horrible flicks—this is the season of giving, after all—here are some little ways in which these bombs excel:

The In-a-Nutshell Award for Best Unintentional Criticism 'He's pretty honest with his feelings. I don't think he knows how to act' (AntiTrust, said about Phillippe).

Gaggiest Gag A tie: A wayward testicle that's chased through a hospital and ends up in someone's dessert (Tomcats) and a shit explosion when a toilet—complete with the gassy girl who is occupying it—crashes through the floor to the classroom below (Not Another Teen Movie).

The Thank-God-for-Big-Girls Teen-Choice Award Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, whose shower scene and cat suits persuaded little boys everywhere to stop fucking around with video games and work on finding Dad's Playboy collection (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider).

Best Use of a Non-Jiggly Body Part to Hold Audience Interest The raven-haired Emmanuelle Chriqui, whose follicular stylings blessedly took the focus off her lame boy-band co-stars (On the Line).

The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living Award for Best Philosophizing 'It's weird. Three days ago, I had a phat job and not a worry in the world—and now I'm going to turn into a vampire' (The Forsaken).

And, finally:

Best Keanu-as-Himself Moment Since Bill & Ted Eulogizing a 9-year-old as 'a little man; just a boy, really' (Hardball). CP

Rebellious Jukebox

Fifteen days music-free, I decided to go to see Wilco at the 9:30 Club. Because it was my first rock show of the New War, I figured I would get to see how my musical brothers and sisters were taking it.

See, the frivolous and the ironic and the fringe were all supposed to be dead. It nagged me that the people who were telling us that anything outside the serious, sincere mainstream was off-limits—or worse, that music could be used to "heal" our national wounds—were the same ones who had Pez-fed us Fat Joe's money love, Creed's amped-up Christ, and Aerosmith's crusty lips. Their arguments only reaffirmed their beliefs that music should be measured in sales, the Stars and Bars being just the latest marketing tie-in to kick-start the Christmas season. I had no desire to be stuck in Quincy Jones' studio with the al Qaeda blues again.

Despite its major-label parents, Wilco had spent a career on everyone's fringe—indie rock's, alt country's, even NPR's. The band has never been anybody's Train or Ryan Adams, has never had the desire to put pearl-buttoned cowboy shirts on Springsteen songs. Wilco has always played too stoner, too much for the headphones; its Woody takes a walk down Abbey Road.

The band's lead singer, Jeff Tweedy, walked up to the mike in old clothes and an old voice. He said nothing, just launched into a set of spiffy and spacey new tunes. Tunes full of drum loops, guitar frags, and straight-up goofs on Elvis and the entire O Brother bandwagon. He used the moment to debut a song called "Ashes of the American Flag." A song not about terrorism.

But the crowd went with it anyway. My fellow travelers sang along to "Passenger Side" and the Guthrie tune "California Stars." This wasn't about healing. This was a much smaller but far more important fight.

Late in the set, Tweedy started to explain that the band's new album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was finished but that its major label wouldn't release the thing as is. So Wilco had bought the record back—and was now an orphan looking for a home. In the meantime, the album was available for streaming on the group's Web site. It was clear that everyone in attendance, Tweedy noted, had already heard the songs, even memorized them.

The crowd had only one question, which it chanted over and over again, interrupting Tweedy's spiel: "What label?"

The singer looked genuinely confused.

To the folks in the audience, being indie really mattered. It mattered because it was an insurance policy against Tweedy's doing any American Pie soundtracks or appearing at George W. Bush's ranch yodeling "Dixie" next to Vladimir Putin and Garth Brooks. He was their weirdo, and they wanted him to stay that way.

Even after 25 years, indie rock and its DIY principles still matter. Terrorist attack or no terrorist attack, this band could be your life. So the crowd hollered: "What label?"

"You don't need a label to play rock 'n' roll," Tweedy finally shot back, in perfect indie-rock fashion. The audience had its moment of Zen.

In any year, the best listeners can hope for are these little fits of rebellion. Maybe that's what indie rock is really all about: not scenes or single bands, but incidents of rebellion. A few good shows to dance your ass off at. A few good records to make the world feel a little less cold, a little more yours. Not the big takeover, but a moment when you win, when the fringe wins. It doesn't really matter that Wilco eventually signed to a major-label subsidiary; Yankee Hotel is still the best album never released this year. Be thankful for the downloads. Be thankful that Tweedy took a stand, however brief.

No one takes a stand anymore. Sigur Rós played as background music on C.S.I. Liz Phair fell into the Gap. Glitchcore nobodies Múm bubbled through a Sony laptop commercial. The Minutemen played the Jackass theme song. And everyone's favorite free mix tape, Napster, died and no one noticed.

Instead of one big rebellion, this year was marked by tiny pissing matches. It's sad that one of the few moments I felt any sense of indie community was when the Other Music mail-order guy recognized my name over the phone. The Strokes or the White Stripes? Is underground hiphop addicted to hermetic philosophy in the same way that Tom Cruise can't let go of Scientology? Is Ken Burns an asshole?

With so many little arguments, there was no time to build a consensus about anything. It was all just moments. The closest thing I felt to an indie revolution this year was the summertime !!! show in an Upper Northwest basement. We waited an eternity in someone's back yard, downing Dr. Skippers until the band took to no stage. The !!!ers shook ass. We did, too. They pumped their fists. We did, too. And some lucky dudes got to lock lips with the lanky lead singer.

In this new indie world, !!! played for everyone—a little avant-skronk, a little Clash, some Beasties raps, some James Brown funky shit. The only thing the band didn't have time for was decent lyrics. After the set, the cops showed up. They were concerned about the noise and the beer.

What's going to happen when there really is a new revolution?

We didn't get the chance to find out this year. The only things I know for sure are that the Wilson Center finally closed, that Fugazi finally didn't have to play in the rain at Fort Reno, that the Black Cat finally got a decent space for smaller bands, that the Dismemberment Plan finally made a great record, that Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins finally came out with their book. And that Ken Burns is an asshole.

The only time indie folks could actually talk about music without arguing was when somebody died. We lost Joey Ramone and Takoma Park native John Fahey. But we gained their reissues.

In Fahey's book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, he lights on the meaning of being a troublemaker, one who would fling cherry bombs at cars and generate genuine outsider status just out of fingerpicking an acoustic—what he called "American primitive guitar." The joys of mischief stayed with him through his days hunting rare 78s, drifting up the West Coast, gigging with Thurston Moore, and curating lost hillbilly and blues recordings.

Fahey ends a chapter summing up his messed-up P.G. County youth with this declaration: "I really haven't changed at all. And that's alright with me. I never wanted to change anyway. So, what the hell?"

Maybe those little flares of rebellion can become a sort of life. Fahey could have been speaking for Tweedy, one oppressive era—the '50s—standing in for a burgeoning new one. So what do we have to rebel against now? Military tribunals would be a start, along with, lest we forget, Fat Joe and Creed and Aerosmith and everything else in the mainstream. And kids who wear indie like a badge instead of a purpose.

Although there were no major breakthroughs in 2001, there were still plenty of flares shot into the great Disney darkness. By my list, plenty of new bands took real creative risks, took magical detours from the norm, made playing wild tunes something honorable and doable. And the vets proved that Fahey wasn't wrong, that you can make dissenting a career choice.

The year—no matter how difficult—proved that there will always be bands that could be your life. Here are a few, in no particular order:

The Argument, Fugazi Count the band out and this is what you get—egg on your face. I wrote it off after its last real full-length, End Hits, left me sour. But then Ian MacKaye wrote "Cashout," a song that sums up the gentrifying D.C. of the moment. The rest of the album holds together not as a testament to the band's politics but to its intent on exploring new sounds and making its audience feel something besides the decibels. The music serves the cause just as much as the cause itself.

Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, Prefuse 73 Imagine dropping a crate of your finest beats on the cement, taking your boot heels to the vinyl, and then gluing the busted-up pieces together and taking them out for a spin. Disjointed, broken-bones hiphop shares space with glitchy melancholia, coffee-shop clatter, and a couple fighting in the apartment next door. A DJ finally went lo-fi and found out that he could relate.

Innocence & Despair, The Langley Schools Music Project In the mid-'70s, British Columbia music teacher Hans Fenger recorded on two-track his 9- to 12-year-old students performing popular love-rock standards. Listening to the kids clamor through "Band on the Run," recast "Space Oddity" with fun-house sounds, and treat "Saturday Night" as a pep rally, you'll realize that Fenger & Co. managed to do what Almost Famous didn't: cut away the AOR cheese and turn the rawk of the Me Decade into something inspirational. When 9-year-old Sheila Behman steps up to the piano to whisper-warble through "Desperado," she makes you wish you'd met her back in summer camp.

Cold House, Hood It took a band from Wetherby, West Yorkshire, to make a guitar record for hiphop heads. Hood uses guitars as atmosphere and to trace out heartbroken melodies, then throws up twitchy beats, frozen Dr. Dre lines, and muffled bumps. Spookier than Deltron. More depressing than Def Jux.

The Glow, Pt. 2, the Microphones Studio whiz Phil Elvrum did what Sebadoh, Bright Eyes, and Papa M could not: He made a bedroom masterwork filled with acoustic weepies, sly tricks of sound, and instruments that take balls to play (steel drums, anyone?).

Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea, Future Pilot AKA Glasgwegian (and former Soup Dragon) Sushil Dade gathered 30-plus of the indie elite, including Stuart Murdoch, Norman Blake, and a Vaseline, to dig into his Indian roots. Guess what? It doesn't suck. Everyone recorded happy, dazed, and shimmery without sounding like people on a field trip. One of the few new indie-rock records that doesn't sound retro—unless retro means 1998.

Seasonally Affective: A Piano Magic Retrospective 1996–2000, Piano Magic Everyone needs music to snooze by, and this is as somnolent as they come. Piano Magic serves its rhythms chilled, its vocals distilled in jiggly Jell-O, and its guitars cut-up. On second thought, Piano Magic might be too loaded with surprises for a sound sleep. Like when the drums get menacing, the guitars plug in and shriek to life, and singer Glen Johnson and a female partner wake up to mumble a twisted tale over the ambience.

Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues, Charley Patton Using his acoustic as beatbox and his voice as dirt road, Patton—the originator of the Delta sound—roughs up the blues so much he won't let you romanticize old-timey music ever again. Patton's entire recorded works are present in this seven-disc set. One of the last of the dream projects produced by Fahey and his Revenant label, the box set opens up lavishly, with hundreds of pages of text, song lyrics, and even a book written by Blind Joe Death himself. Each CD is held in the doughnut of a cardboard 78. But that's just the nerd stuff. This isn't a museum piece for indie record hounds, but a testament to one of music's—indie or otherwise—essential truths: There have always been rebel voices, and there always will be. CP

Cheer Down

"Be nice to everyone": That's what Jimmy Stewart once told his teenage daughter when she came asking for a little pre-college worldly guidance. The famous father offered nothing about money or boys or staying away from Hitchcock. No, the Hollywood legend simply delivered those four easy words, hugged his daughter, and continued reading. "Be nice to everyone." Four words, six syllables. As simple as that.

I heard this story on Nov. 30, 2001, at the Jimmy Stewart Museum in downtown Indiana, Pa. (Indiana being his birthplace and all, not to mention the Christmas Tree Capital of the World). The executive director of the museum, Elizabeth Salomé, was giving me a personal tour of the Stewart collection, and she said that the "be nice" bit was her favorite. Reporter's notebook in hand, I smiled like a jackass and tried to stay focused.

But then, just when I thought this year couldn't get any worse, Salomé switched celebrity gears and mentioned George Harrison. A bit confused by the segue—did she mean George Bailey?—I proudly said that the Quiet Beatle had always been my favorite. She solemnly said that he was dead.

Good fucking grief.

Truth be told, I had a hard time concentrating on Zuzu's precious petals after that one. In fact, I started to get kinda pissed, a tad irrational. There I was, on assignment in a creepy museum in a creepy town in a creepy state, the broken trunk of my shitty rental car flapping around like a fat lip, the world maybe ending and maybe not, and just like that, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" was everywhere—and for all the wrong reasons.

Helluva ending to a helluva year.

And then things got weirder: Back at the Holiday Inn, I found something. Something small but significant. A sign, perhaps; a reminder, maybe. And I'm not talking about the 20-year-old Playboy Playmate I'd meet later on that same day, either—although Miss November certainly had something to do with the day's final twist.

No, one of the first songs I listened to on Sept. 12 wound up being one of the first songs I listened to on Nov. 30: Harrison's "Cheer Down," an oddball tune with silly-sinister lyrics—"If your dog should be dead/I'm gonna love you instead"—and extended doses of that trademark bubbly-woozy guitar. Among the 30 or so CDs I grabbed before heading off for Indiana, Pa., was Best of Dark Horse 1976–1989, although I was more than a little surprised to see the disc at the bottom of my backpack. And although the album's closing track may not be of the same caliber as "Something" or "Here Comes the Sun"—my choices for the all-time best Beatles songs—"Cheer Down" and its yin-yang message of grinning through the shitstorm was an apt soundtrack to another lousy day in a long line of lousy days.

Sometimes, I figured, life just works that way.

Oh, and about Miss November? Lindsey Vuolo is a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania by day, a semiclad bartender by night. And if I started talking to her at 11:55 p.m., then she was pretty much done with my doughy ass by midnight. But what the hell: By that time, the sheer ridiculous of it all—Jimmy Stewart and suitcase bombs and two Beatles left and one of the most beautiful women in the world talking about Hef and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—was breathtaking. And cheering down seemed like the only reasonable thing to do.

Well, that and be nice to everyone.

So thanks for indulging me, and here we go: The following list comprises the best songs, albums, and musical moments of the past year, a fairly good one for pop music, I believe, if not for most everything else. And whattaya say we stay in Indiana, Pa., and kick things off with a man who's been cheering down his whole deliciously sordid life...

25. "Gets Me Through," Ozzy Osbourne I heard this power-chord grinder while driving that shitty rental car through Blue Spruce Park's gaudy Festival of Lights. "I'm not the Antichrist/Or the Iron Man." An air-guitar special, and the Blizzard's best since "Flying High Again." Ho-ho-ho.

24. Timeless, Various Artists This 12-track tribute to Hank Williams could have been whole lot better—what's the deal with Keb' Mo' anyway?—but grandson Hank III's "I'm a Long Gone Daddy" proves that blood is thicker than bourbon.

23. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, John Williams Yes, director Chris Columbus slathers a creepy calliopic theme over every scene. But listening to the music during the end credits proves that this is Williams' catchiest soundtrack since Indy chased after the ark.

22. "Can't Cry These Tears," Garbage Producer-drummer Butch Vig's idea to get supervixen Shirley Manson in a swooning Shirelles state of mind was pure genius. Too bad the rest of Beautifulgarbage sounds like a phone job.

21. The Pink Panther, Henry Mancini Intricate cocktail swing from those tinkling highball days of 1964. A classic cleaned up beautifully by Buddha Records—and a true-blue make-out special. Or so I hear.

20. Can You Dig It? The '70s Soul Experience, Various Artists Six discs of the funkiest all-time sounds gathered by the good people at Rhino. Maybe these shaggy sideburns aren't such a bad idea after all.

19. "Let Me Touch You for Awhile," Alison Krauss + Union Station The bluegrass songbird proves that she gets those dirty urges, too. As good as anything on her brilliant solo album Forget About It. Now, if only she'd ditch those ho-hum boys in her band.

18. "Lady Marmalade," Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya, Pink Better than the original. And the buildup to Aguilera's histrionic finale is cheesy-chills spectacular. Oh, and I saw Miss November dance to the song. Which helps.

17. Good Rockin' Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records, Various Artists Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' pedal-to-the-metal "Blue Moon of Kentucky" had the trunk of that shitty rental car banging along to the beat. Nice moment: Made me not hate Thrifty so much.

16. & 15. Greatest Hits, Billy Idol and Magic: The Very Best of Olivia Newton-John, Olivia Newton-John Billy for road trips; Olivia for the day after those weird dreams about grade-school crush Julie Rothera. (Yeah, like you're not hankering for a little "Xanadu" right now.)

14. "Get Ur Freak On," Missy Elliott Music for Michael Jordan to score by. Gets the MCI Center shimmying, and when's the last time that happened?

13. "Every Other Time," LFO Julie Rothera's brother Matt once haymakered me so hard that I dropped like a sack of melons and cried all the whole way home. The next day, Julie and I slow-danced to a fast Def Leppard song. We were 11. It was autumn in New England. Life was good.

12. All Things Must Pass, George Harrison "Sunrise doesn't last all morning/A cloudburst doesn't last all day."

11. I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings, Radiohead No surprise here: Thom Yorke & Co. sound just as good onstage. Previously unreleased weeper "True Love Waits" is a masterpiece.

10. Gorillaz, Gorillaz Tripped-up aural wallpaper from Blur's Damon Albarn and his ragtag crew of beat-mad hooligans. Plus, I really dig cartoons.

9. Missundaztood, Pink Girls still just wanna have fun. "Get the Party Started" is the single of the year, but damn if a good chunk of her second album isn't filled with equally infectious pop goodies. Prediction: She covers "She Bop" in 2002.

8. Today, Raul Malo More salsa-infused than his sterling work with the Mavericks, but the husky singer still indulges in the usual eclectic blend of genres. And the puckish duet "Takes Two to Tango" saves Shelby Lynne from having a completely lame musical year.

7. Amnesiac, Radiohead Still not sure what Yorke is trying to say, but he does a beautiful job of confusing the hell outta me. More accessible than Kid A.

6. The Invisible Band, Travis Fran Healy must have stocked up on Kleenex for the epic one-two punch finish of "Indefinitely" and "The Humpty Dumpty Love Song"—the weepy likes of which haven't been seen since Captain Fantastic's "We All Fall in Love Sometimes"–and– "Curtains" close.

5. Gold, Ryan Adams I'm hearing Dylan, the Band, Elton John—and a whole lotta nifty singalong hooks from the former lead singer of y'allternative band Whiskeytown. Opener and obvious single "New York, New York" is sweet, sentimental road music that avoids being sappy.

4. God Bless the Go-Go's, the Go-Go's "Hello, world/We're here again." Trust me: I couldn't believe it was this good, either. With help from Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, the beauties take the beat back to their punkette roots without losing the candy center. Their show at the 9:30 Club was tops for the year—and zaftig 40-something Belinda Carlisle looked even better than she did in Playboy.

3. Love and Theft, Bob Dylan The album came out on Sept. 11, and we still noticed. Among the knock-knock jokes, the cruise-ship crooning, and the roots-rock rambling, Dylan unloads the apocalyptic call of "High Water (For Charley Patton)"—just in time, too.

2. Weezer, Weezer Ten songs, 28 minutes, and the most fuzzed-out fun to be had in pop this year. So cheer-inducing was the guitar hook of "Hash Pipe" that the Baltimore Orioles played the song between innings at Camden Yards—that is, before they were told what a hash pipe is.

1. The Blueprint, Jay-Z Front to back, not a wasted minute to be found. The flow, the lyrics, the samples: inspired, perfect, unique. On the booty-call shopping list of "Girls, Girls, Girls," the Jigga-Man admits to having "an appetite for destruction, but I scrape the plate." This is a man who knows all about cheering down. CP

Positive Flow

For a few weeks following Sept. 11, I selfishly but guiltlessly thought I might actually get something out of the tragedy. MTV was digging in the crates for inoffensive, optimistic clips and—in light of America's new seriousness—some critics were predicting the passing of frivolous music altogether. For me, that could mean only the beginning of the end for the materialism, violence, and unwarranted misogyny that have been beating rap enthusiasts in the head for so long. Still, with the way the industry works, that change could take a while. It's now mid-December and, as nihilism and petty beefs between artists escalate again, I've decided not to hold my breath—even if Jay-Z was rockin' a Che Guevara T—shirt on MTV Unplugged. Besides, there were hopeful messages around this year before anybody decided that we needed them.

"At seven o'clock, I make my way/Out the door to see what is in store for the day/Without the slightest idea of what I might encounter/Through the rays of the morning sun I found a flower." Accompanied by medieval-sounding flutes and strings, the first few lines (not to mention the title) of Pep Love's "Living Is Beautiful" may seem a little sappy. But it's hard to resist the optimism of even the most saccharine moments on the Oakland, Calif., undergrounder's appropriately titled debut LP, Ascension. When he's not gushing, Pep bursts with an ambitious vocabulary and doubly ambitious ideas: "Infinite amount of choices, limited chances/Don't be timid, intimidated and disadvantaged..../Stand up and fight/We get you hyped/'Cause hiphop is propaganda."

On that note, Pep mounts a platform of empowerment and self-awareness with simple, ethereal melodies and straightforward drum programming. And though certain lines from the stirring title track must be chalked up to eerie coincidence (Ascension was recorded long before Sept. 11), why waste the sentiment? "Exasperation of an entire nation causes inflammation/We're master masons, paper chasin', bricklayin', and playin' the game that we were placed in." Pep Love says rebuild.

Aesop Rock, a favorite among Internet geeks and college kids for his razor-edged voice and verbal avalanches, lacks Pep's pep, but his latest LP, Labor Days, is no less motivational in its own dense, brooding fashion. "All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way," offers Aesop over the wistful sax of "Daylight."

In other words, Labor Days is a slacker testimonial, an album-length expression of disdain for anything 9-to-5. But from the glass-half-full perspective, Aesop is all about self-determination. "No Regrets," a hopping, piano-driven ditty set in a bohemian alternate universe suspiciously close to Aesop's own Lower East Side apartment, tells the tale of Lucy, an awkward, reclusive young woman who resists the conventions of others and spends her entire life sketching. On her deathbed, she declares, "I knew what I wanted and did it 'til it was done/So I've been the dream that I wanted to be since Day 1." OK, at the end Lucy dies alone with nothing to show but a hospital room filled with doodles, but she's at least happy.

The darkest hiphop album of the year is easily its best. From the distorted, distressing intro—"It's a cold world out there, sometimes I think I'm getting a little frosty myself"—Cannibal Ox's futuristic first opus, The Cold Vein, plays like the soundtrack to Ground Zero, a comparison all the more striking for reasons of proximity. The Harlem duo envision the city as an "iron galaxy" of misfortune and themselves as "pigeons" struggling to get off the ground: "Let's talk in laymen terms/Rotten apples and big worms/Early birds and poachers/New York is evil at its core, so those that have more than them/Prepare to be victims/Ate up by vultures and politicians in a dog-eat-dog culture."

But just like Labor Days, The Cold Vein is all the more encouraging for its seeming grimness. Like Aesop Rock, Ox's Vast Aire and Vordul Megilah lust for language, and their art slowly becomes their savior. They rise above typical b-boy wordplay on songs such as "Ox Out the Cage": "I grab the mike like Are You Experienced?/But I don't play the guitar, I play my cadence." But Vast and Vordul are at their best when their meteoric metaphors fall to earth, helping them work through confounding relationships ("The F-Word"), inner-city violence ("Vein"), and drug dependency ("Painkillers").

Unlike most of their "reality-rap" counterparts, who merely reflect and revel in their situation, these two recognize how fortunate they are in having the opportunity to express themselves: "‘And let there be light' was understood/When a mike stand descended from up and above into the 'hood." It's not drugs, jewelry, and big cars, but creativity and purpose that elevate them, as Vordul reveals on the triumphant (and hidden) final cut: "We pigeons became phoenix with open minds/To open yours."

That said, it's always seemed a little silly to me to talk about the "best" rapper or the "best" album of the year, and recent events haven't changed that. But nowadays, it's just good to be reminded that there are those who know how to make the best out of a bad situation. CP

Improv Class

The jazz world is always starved for attention. Despite the fact that it's a niche trade and, increasingly, a cottage industry, the people who work under its rubric—and I count myself among them—still look for signs of a commercial upturn, because jazz was once America's popular music, and it can be so again, right?

Wrong.

The jazz industry continued to struggle in 2001, with its overall music-market share smaller than ever—around 2 percent, according to industry estimates. Still, the year began with a surge—all the attention, good or bad, for Ken Burns' Jazz documentary on PBS—and ended with a surge—Diana Krall's The Look of Love debuted in the Billboard Top 10, a first for a traditional jazz artist. But in between were a few thousand mostly ignored CDs—whether they deserved to be or not (and most did).

In my office at JazzTimes, where I got more than 250 CDs a week over the past year, the numbing number of releases incited not an up-all-night-with-headphones-on endurance test, but a refined—albeit superficial—way of judging whether a CD would be heard: If the cover looked like crap, it went straight into the giveaway bin. This decisive processing technique, added to denial methods such as the Oh-Fuck-Another-Goddamn-Free-Jazz-Jam Procedure, enabled me for the most part to separate the chaff from the wheat. If I wasted some wheat in the process, so be it—my office, my basement, and the world are filled with enough music to last several lifetimes.

Here are 20 jazz releases, in no particular order, that took me away to that special place where if I listened too long, I'd probably break down and cry.

New Releases
Come Play With Me, Cuong Vu On trumpeter Cuong Vu's third CD as a leader, he takes the spaciness and the simmering, rather than the raw, energy of Miles Davis' fusion-era bands—which featured six or more musicians—and translates their spirit into a trio while retaining the music's widescreen effects. Bassist Stomu Takeishi and percussionist John Hollenbeck give the music a broad foundation as Vu processes his melody-rich playing through electronics, and the effect is both soothing and anthemic. Come Play With Me is an album for the patient to get lost in again and again.

Somewhere Else Before, E.S.T. Like Vu, Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson mixes electronics into his trio. Somewhere Else Before, E.S.T.'s American debut, which compiles tracks from his previous two European releases, is filled with electronica-savvy jazz that borrows from ambient's subtle sound effects and drum 'n' bass' rhythms but retains an improvisational core. The trio isn't groundbreaking, as some of Svensson's fans have claimed, but E.S.T.'s music is highly melodic and inviting, and a perfect introduction to the still-burgeoning crossover genre of jazztronica.

Corridors & Parallels, David S. Ware Quartet Tenor saxophonist David S. Ware has been cranking out smart ecstatic jazz for many years now, but perhaps even he was tired of hearing himself in his long-standing quartet setting with pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker, and drummer Guillermo E. Brown. Egged on by Shipp's increasing interest in electronica, Ware & Co. play against the keyboardist's synth and organ sounds with renewed verve, resulting in one of the best albums of the sax player's career.

Art of the Trio, Vol. 5: Progression, Brad Mehldau Trio This double-CD of lyrical beauty and musical reinvention finds pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jorge Rossy tackling old war horses "It Might as Well Be Spring" and "How Long Has This Been Going On?" as if they were brand-new fillies. As on 1998's Art of the Trio, Vol. 3: Songs, Mehldau covers Nick Drake's "River Man," imbuing the gently swinging melody with resigned melancholy before he just plain swings it.

Somethin' Special, Tardo Hammer Whereas Mehldau takes a distinctly post–Bill Evans approach, pianist Tardo Hammer looks to pre-Evans boppers such as Bud Powell for his run-and-gun style. Somethin' Special is just that—outgoing, gritty, and upbeat. Modern takes on vintage jazz often come across as redundant, but Hammer, bassist Dennis Irwin, and drummer Leroy Williams show why burning bop was so breathtaking in the first place.

Past, Present & Futures, Chick Corea New Trio Chick Corea has absorbed both Evans and Powell into his unique style, which helps make his New Trio's Past, Present & Futures, a great addition to the pianist's wildly inconsistent discography. Bassist Avishai Cohen and drummer Jeff Ballard are hyperkinetic and hyperconnected foils to Corea on this program of 10 originals and a Fats Waller cover. The band moves as one, resulting in virtuoso trio music at its finest.

Black Stars, Jason Moran Speaking of virtuoso trios, the connection between pianist Jason Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen, and drummer Nasheet Waits is as symbiotic a relationship as there is in jazz right now, as they proved on 2000's Facing Left. Add veteran reedist Sam Rivers to the threesome and the result is Black Stars, a star-making album for Moran. The CD is filled with accessible but edgy inside-out jazz that will appeal to traditionalists and avant-gardists alike, all of whom should marvel at the 26-year-old Moran's lively playing, solid sense of history, and futuristic ear.

Witness, Dave Douglas It's easy to take trumpeter Dave Douglas for granted: He's a prolific composer with catholic tastes and a different band for each. He also releases more CDs (five in the last two years) than the average fan can handle—or afford. With Douglas, however, it's usually worth saving up those pennies to keep up with him. Witness, performed by his band of the same name, saw Douglas stretching himself politically as well as musically. The CD was inspired partially by the war in the former Yugoslavia, and the nine-piece group, which includes strings, electronics, and tuba among its standard jazz-band core, plays Douglas' Eastern European–folk–music–inspired themes with dedicated tenacity. This RCA-underwritten release isn't Douglas' most accessible album, but it ranks with 1997's Sanctuary as his most ambitious.

Everybodys Mouth's a Book, Henry Threadgill & Make a Move and Up Popped the Two Lips, Henry Threadgill's Zooid Like Douglas, reedist Henry Threadgill once composed ambitious works for a major label. But it's been five years since 1996's Where's Your Cup? for Columbia, and Threadgill has turned to indie Pi for its follow-ups (yes, plural): Everybodys Mouth's a Book, featuring his old band, Make a Move, and Up Popped the Two Lips, featuring his newer group, Zooid. Both albums are grand experiments in Threadgill's distinct style—characterized by discursive harmonies, wide tonal palettes, and multifaceted compositions—but whereas the Make a Move disc focuses on groovy electric-tinged styles, the Zooid album tackles acoustic themes that take their cues from folk and chamber music. Both discs are difficult and brilliant.

Reissues and Archival Releases
Travelling Somewhere, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath This is big-band experimental jazz with a groove from 1973 by South African pianist Chris McGregor and his aptly named Brotherhood. It's also a revelation of funk and freedom.

Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933–1944, Billie Holiday The recordings encompass the sunniest era of the great vocalist's otherwise cloudy life, and the often joyful music reflects it.

El Tambor de Cuba, Chano Pozo Conguero Chano Pozo, who helped ignite Dizzy Gillespie's fusion of jazz and Latin music, was one of the original gangstas, living a hardscrabble life filled with drugs, hos, and gambling. This invaluable box set brings together many of Pozo's best performances for the first time and pairs them with a thorough booklet about his life and music.

The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, Miles Davis and Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About That Time, Miles Davis There can never be too much Miles as far as I'm concerned—though check back with me next spring, after his uneven '80s recordings are given the box-set treatment.

The Time Is Now!, Phil Ranelin and Vibes From the Tribe, Phil Ranelin Tribe was a collection of Detroit musicians who took the popular music of the early and mid-'70s—funk and R&B—and fashioned jazz to it. Trombonist Phil Ranelin was a co-leader, along with reedist Wendell Harrison, and the music they created was political, earnest, and groovin'—if a touch corny. It also anticipated many of the rock-electronica-jazz experiments of Tortoise, the Chicago Underground Quartet, 5ive Style, and dozens of other Windy City bands. Check out the upcoming CD of remixes of tracks from The Time Is Now! and Vibes From the Tribe for proof.

Lawrence of Newark, Larry Young Though not organist Larry Young's best work, 1973's Lawrence of Newark, featuring guitarist James "Blood" Ulmer, is still a great blend of jazz, funk, psychedelia, Indian ragas, and free-jazz energy.

Self Portrait, Artie Shaw A fantastic, self-chosen, and self-annotated selection of clarinetist Artie Shaw's best work from his entire career, which he ended permanently in 1955, sick of fame and just about everything else. Now 91, the still whip-smart Shaw hasn't played his instrument in almost 50 years, but the ex–Mr. Ava Gardner and –Mr. Lana Turner, among others, played the way he fell in love: like no one else.

Nuclear War, Sun Ra This ultraobscure 1982 Sun Ra release was rescued so that all eternity can chant the funky title track's mantra: "Talking about nuclear war/It's a motherfucker, don't you know/If they push that button, your ass got to go." CP

Space and the Times

It was the year the Greeks arrived, as did the Brits and Michael Kaiser, the American who turned the London arts scene on its head a few years back. Around Washington, theaters were being built and being shared, disasters were striking and being weathered, and playwrights were loving and being scandalized by the way local houses handled their work.

There were new personnel in high places, from Bo Derek (rumored to be one of the KenCen "10"—presidential appointees to an expanded board of directors) to Ben Ali of Ben's Chili Bowl, who joined a freshly invigorated Lincoln Theatre board that's trying to get that historic U Street house out of its booking doldrums.

D.C. may no longer be Broadway's tryout town of choice, but that doesn't mean local audiences don't still see some shows before New Yorkers do. Besides the conventional pre-B'way run of August Wilson's King Hedley II, the comedy with music Blue, which broke records at Arena Stage, opened off-Broadway with much of the D.C. cast intact. Wonder of the World is currently at the Manhattan Theatre Club with Sarah Jessica Parker in what Woolly Mammoth audiences will think of as the Deb Gottesman role, and local playwright Heather McDonald's An Almost Holy Picture opens soon on Broadway with Kevin Bacon in the part that Jerry Whiddon essayed a few years back at Round House. A more recent Round House hit, Smell of the Kill, will open on Broadway in a few weeks, and Slam!, a smash for the Studio Theatre last year, is scheduled to arrive in Manhattan early in 2002. Studio also managed the unprecedented trick of opening Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love the same week the show premiered on Broadway.

Of course, Washington and New York shared other events this year—dreadful events, whose aftershocks are still being played out in the hospitality and entertainment fields. Broadway's difficulties made national headlines; Washington's were less well-publicized. Ask local theater folk how Sept. 11 affected them, and you get a variety of responses. Arena Stage and the Shakespeare Theatre, which were both playing evenings of Greek tragedy when the terrorist attacks occurred, report only minor dips in attendance. They're heavily subscriber-based, though; smaller theaters seem harder hit.

Christopher Henley, who made a Cherry Red Productions debut to rave reviews on Sept. 7 as the title character in Killer Joe, says the show played to sparse houses for about three weeks—and then, just as audiences had finally begun showing up again, the bombing started in Afghanistan. That pattern was repeated elsewhere: The Washington Stage Guild's Ann Norton figures her company's box office take will be down about 20 percent for the year ("lost income we'll never get back") and notes a new skittishness from patrons who were finally feeling safe in the 14th Street corridor. "Before, we were battling misconceptions about parking and crime," she says. "Now we have to convince people that downtown is anthrax-free."

Still, if many troupes suffered in September, business has basically recovered in the last month or so. A bigger problem is that with the philanthropic world's attention focused elsewhere, arts donations—both private and corporate—have yet to bounce back. And still up in the air is what will happen when major foundations meet in early 2002 to allocate next year's grants. Making the case for theater funding won't be easy in an environment marked by both recession and war.

The best arguments will probably be those floated by companies such as Arlington's nationally renowned Signature Theatre, which is busy finalizing a deal to create a snazzier home in a new building not far from its converted auto-repair shop in Shirlington. Woolly Mammoth, too, will present a promising profile for funders, now that ground has finally been broken on the downtown tower that will let the company leave its temporary Kennedy Center quarters and move in across 7th Street from the Lansburgh. Round House's long-awaited Bethesda space is at last more than a gleam in a developer's eye (the company will move in May from its old Silver Spring house), Olney's ambitious expansion drive took another step forward with an October groundbreaking, and Studio, a longtime 14th Street–arts–
corridor champion, bought two adjacent buildings to provide a little elbow room for Secondstage projects and the Studio school.

Big players won't be the only ones seeking grants to secure spaces. Gala will have to raise a small fortune to create a stage in a corner of the proposed Tivoli Theatre complex in Columbia Heights. Either the Washington Stage Guild or the African Continuum Theatre Company, which are currently jockeying for space in the office tower that will rise on the site of the old wax museum at 5th and K Streets NW, will also have some fundraising to do. There's even talk of a second auditorium at the Clark Street Playhouse, where the Washington Shakespeare Company stalwarts, long accustomed to living with Damoclean fears about the privately owned site's development potential, are finally breathing easier as Arlington's arts-friendly county government prepares to acquire the building.

But the year's big news, literally and figuratively, was the range of changes ushered in at the Kennedy Center by its new president, Michael Kaiser, an arts-world mover and shaker who made his name overhauling flailing top-rank institutions. Whether you believe the KenCen fits that bill probably depends on your ZIP code, but there's no denying the new sense of energy that's come over the place since Kaiser's enthronement. There's suddenly loads of cash for everything from parking expansion to programming ($50 million just from arts patron Alberto Vilar, a major contributor to other organizations Kaiser has run), plus new initiatives aimed at sharing the center's arts-management wealth and raising the center's profile at home and around the world. That latter goal got jump-started when Kaiser announced a festival of Sondheim shows for next summer.

Meanwhile, Washington Post theater critic Lloyd Rose began a yearlong sabbatical last January, missing the twin waves of Greek tragedy and Brit comedy she'd have had a field day interpreting and leaving reviewing chores to Nelson Pressley, who not only handled them but also found time to pen features for the Sunday arts section, tackling such topics as the dearth of D.C. theater spaces, the value (or lack thereof) of awards shows, and the reasons the nation's most talked-about plays never see the light of day in D.C.

As for the art itself, well....

Commercial Houses
The KenCen's mainstream attractions were a fairly standard array of Broadway touring musicals and dramas, but a midyear Britfest and smart imports from former British colonies brought D.C. audiences some of the most astonishing evenings the venue has hosted in years. Underattended, in mostly brief runs that allowed little time for word of mouth to develop, were an uproarious Royal Shakespeare Company foray into commedia dell'arte (A Servant to Two Masters), a haunting one-woman show (Spoonface Steinberg), and a pair of imaginative epic-novel adaptations (Mill on the Floss, Cloudstreet) that left patrons slack-jawed when they weren't cheering. The Washington Opera imported a breathtakingly cinematic Madama Butterfly. And any year that brings South Africans John Kani and Winston Ntshona back to town in their classic anti-apartheid drama, The Island, pretty much has to be counted as an artistic success.

Which is a good thing, because the rest of the city's for-profit houses were having ghastly years. The poor, neglected National Theatre, which sat dark for the first eight months of 2001 except for a desultory, widely panned bus-and-truck Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, finally announced a real subscription season, only to see its fall attraction, The Full Monty, shut down operations in Chicago in the wake of Sept. 11. A revamped, lighter version of the musical will arrive late next year, but that cancellation left the city's most audience-friendly touring house empty for all but five weeks—the worst season the National has had since it closed entirely for major renovations some 20 years ago.

The Warner Theatre booked little of note except a Bea Arthur cabaret act (which was well-enough received that it'll open on Broadway next month). And Ford's Theatre destroyed any good will that had been generated by an amusing one-man, 30-odd-character show about a restaurant reservations-taker (Fully Committed) by mounting a To Kill a Mockingbird so ineptly directed that even its cast members were embarrassed by it.

Downtown Repertory Houses
Three blocks down E Street, things were healthier at the Shakespeare, though only two of the five plays the company produced in 2001 were by its namesake playwright. The most interesting of the non-Bard evenings was a sexily argumentative Don Carlos, but it certainly wasn't the most ambitious. That title goes to the conflated Oedipus cycle that had Avery Brooks railing at the gods, even as tragedy of a more modern sort was unfolding in New York and at the Pentagon.

A simultaneous Agamemnon cycle at Arena Stage proved the best work Molly Smith has staged since she arrived there. And she also brought in an Eastern European director to give audiences a startling, darkly brilliant A Streetcar Named Desire that appeared to be taking place in Kosovo rather than New Orleans. But the troupe once regarded as the nation's leading repertory theater also produced dippy, nondramatic hagiographies of Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells, and mounted an amateurish evening of Native American folk tales that would have required major rewrites to pass muster as an elementary-school pageant. Admirable intentions are everywhere these days at Arena, but it sure would be nice if more of them were attached to decent scripts.

Studio was visited by lots of playwrights this year—A.R. Gurney, Tom Stoppard, William Finn, and David Grimm all stopped by, with all but the last of them professing to be enchanted with what Studio's directors had wrought from their scripts. Grimm, however, stormed out of the theater after the first act of his play Kit Marlowe and fired off a letter to the editor of the Washington Post accusing Studio's director of having "butchered" his play by means of unauthorized cuts and fabricated characters, and accusing the theater of "unethical behavior...total disregard for its contractual obligations...shoddy administration and artistic ineptitude." He then had his agents send a cease-and-desist letter that forced the show's closure. Stoppard's The Invention of Love proved a happier experience all around, with the playwright lingering in the lobby to gush about Studio's production the night before a concurrent Broadway mounting won a Tony Award for Featured Actor, Play.

The Source Theatre continued to mount its own plays while playing host to a full Washington Stage Guild season, and it still managed to find room in its crowded schedule for co-productions with Project Y and the African Continuum Theatre Company. With so much activity, something was bound to click. Clickers included the Halloween comedy A Skull in Connemara, a splendidly directed Italian American Reconciliation, and a sharply observed American Buffalo.

Woolly Mammoth increased its attendance by close to 25 percent by moving from its longtime home on Church Street to the American Film Institute's theater at the Kennedy Center. The troupe's work looks slicker there—which is not necessarily a good thing, but it didn't noticeably hinder the year's brightest Woolly comedy, Fuddy Meers.

The Woollies also co-produced Clifford Odets' Rocket to the Moon with the increasingly reliable, ever-more-interesting Theater J, while Gala and the Stanislavsky Theater Studio seemed merely to mark time in the once-bustling theater spaces they've essentially taken off the rental market. The Folger Theatre served up its usual brew of unusual Shakespeare, ranging from a gender-bending As You Like It in a forest of toppled columns to a Deep South, electioneering Macbeth with bouffanted witches who counted dimpled chads as they murmured, "Fair is foul and foul is fair."

'Burbs and Beyond
Maryland's Round House Theatre had one of its best seasons in years, seeming in its more eccentric shows—notably the eerily homicidal Problem Child
and the hilariously hubbicidal Smell of the Kill—to be consciously stealing a page from Woolly Mammoth's playbook. Olney Theatre Center took the opposite tack, staying squarely mainstream with a steady diet of musicals and light comedies, most of them decently produced. The company's current musical, She Loves Me, is pretty enchanting.

Across the Potomac, Signature crossed up expectations with indifferent mountings of Gypsy and Grand Hotel, but redeemed itself nicely with a sharp Putting It Together, which company director Eric Schaeffer had previously staged to hats-in-the-air raves in Los Angeles but tepid reviews in Manhattan. Meanwhile, the Clark Street Playhouse was becoming the area's most reliable spot to find theater for the under-30 set, with a youthfully exuberant Love's Labour's Lost and an acerbically raucous Macbett from Washington Shakespeare Company, a vivid Project Y expedition to the South Pole (Terra Nova), and an acidly hip Woyzeck from a new troupe called Catalyst. And if WSC's In the Summer House had nothing exuberant, acerbic, or comic about it, Steven Scott Mazzola's production nonetheless had plenty to say about youthful alienation.

Elsewhere in Arlington, the Keegan Theatre tackled its first musical, the Spanish language troupe Teatro de la Luna mounted its fourth International Festival, and the American Century Theater—mostly dedicated to rediscovering such forgotten mid-20th-century gems as Philip Barry's Hotel Universe—produced an original musical about Danny Kaye (Danny and Sylvia), one of that period's brighter stars.

And as always, there were the fringe troupes. The Actors Theatre of Washington reorganized itself as a gay company and scored an immediate success with a romantic comedy (After Dark) in the back room of the 1409 Playbill Cafe. Cherry Red not only brought audiences the most consistently inventive titles in local theater (Poona the Fuckdog and Other Plays for Children, for instance), but also, for a change, a genuinely arresting play (Killer Joe).

Other troupes commandeered bars, storefronts, and church basements in a mad scramble to do something that mainstream theaters weren't already doing. And in one particularly happy surprise, a company with the unlikely name of Longacre Lea ventured into a black-box space at Catholic University and staged a hysterically funny, altogether professional, better-than-90-percent-of-everything-else-that's-out-there production of Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth. A Washington Post second-stringer naturally panned it, but audiences came anyway, turning it into an SRO smash.

Let's seize on that as a positive sign, as we head bravely into a new year that promises such inauspicious theatrical glories as Saturday Night Fever and Mamma Mia!. CP

High Points
Mill on the Floss—Kennedy Center
A Servant to Two Masters—Kennedy Center
Cloudstreet—Kennedy Center
The Island—Kennedy Center
Don Carlos—Shakespeare Theatre
Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth—Longacre Lea
Problem Child—Round House Theatre
The Invention of Love—Studio Theatre
A Streetcar Named Desire—Arena Stage
Macbett—Washington Shakespeare Company
Terra Nova—Project Y/Washington Shakespeare Company

Low Points
To Kill a Mockingbird—Ford's Theatre
Coyote Builds North America—Arena Stage
Eleanor: Her Secret Journey—Arena Stage
Kit Marlowe—Studio Secondstage
God of Vengeance—Theater J/ Rorschach Theater

Shuttered Out

The past year in Washington photography can be summed up by the old adage "Small is beautiful." Or, more accurately, "Small will have to do."

With the stalwart exception of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington's major art museums paid photography no heed in 2001. The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery remained closed for renovations until at least 2003. The National Gallery of Art mounted no photography shows this year. Nor did the Phillips Collection. Nor did the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

It's not as if these institutions have spurned photography in the past. Last year alone, the NGA mounted a wonderful show of photographs by 19th-century master Carleton E. Watkins, the Phillips hosted an important exhibition on photographer-painter Ben Shahn, and—just before it closed—the NPG wrapped up a thoughtful show on African-American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington.

But over the past year, photography lovers in the nation's capital have had to satisfy their jones at smaller commercial galleries. And that's a lot to ask of the galleries. No small gallery can host the kind of major retrospective its larger brethren can. And galleries, being by and large for-profit endeavors, are often restricted to showing the kind of work that they can actually move into collectors' hands.

Nonetheless, photography aficionados who were willing to pound the pavement were able to see much laudable work in and around D.C. this year. Here's one man's opinion of the 10 best local photographic exhibitions of 2001:

1. "Montana Legacy: Photographs by Mark Abrahamson," at the National Academy of Sciences The power of this show came as a genuine surprise. Several photographers who have exhibited in D.C. recently (including Adriel Heisey—see below) have taken to the air to document the beauty of the landscape in the American West. No photographer, however, has done it quite so dramatically as Abrahamson. His palette—midnight blue, lichen green, cinnabar red—is as breathtakingly beautiful as its chemical sources are vile. Indeed, Abrahamson, an ardent environmentalist, documents the damage from mining in Montana with such artistry that he threatens to undercut his own message. The exhibition continues through Jan. 4, 2002; by all means, go see it.

2. "Night Work," at the Ralls Collection The British-born photographer Michael Kenna makes crisply, even fastidiously, defined square prints that communicate drama without veering into fantasy. Kenna's finest works play with minimalist geometrical forms: a fence on a beach, curved pool walls, a straight line of stones disappearing into the horizon, rows of books resting on a semi-lit, wall-to-ceiling bookcase—even nuclear-plant cooling towers. Each is lush, moody, and powerful.

3. "Terri Weifenbach," at Addison/Ripley Fine Art When Weifenbach, a master photographic printer, stands behind the viewfinder, she thumbs her nose at one of the most fundamental assumptions in photography: that images must be in focus. Weifenbach's photographs are flagrantly, even gleefully, out-of-focus—and usually the better for it. This treatment renders her prosaic subjects—suburban trees, bushes, and homes—lyrical, much as candlelight flatters a date's harsher features.

4. "Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage, Photographs 1956–2000," at the Corcoran Gallery of Art At his worst, Tress is self-indulgent and easy to dismiss; at his best, he's a conceptual genius. His black-and-white pieces from the '50s and '60s offer a winning mix of documentary and fantasy imagery, and his 1974 Shadow—a novel in photographs brilliantly unspools a narrative using only Tress' own shadow placed within various found environments. Also noteworthy is Tress' more recent, homoerotic work, which—unlike much of his oeuvre—is done with a refreshing sense of humor.

5. "The Western Horizon: New Photographs," at the Kathleen Ewing Gallery Wherever he roams west of the 100th meridian, Macduff Everton seems to catch just the right break in the clouds or precisely the right shape of a lifting fog bank. Everton's images are so dramatic that he's either a technical virtuoso or the luckiest photographer on the face of the Earth. Or maybe both.

6. "Under the Sun: A Sonoran Desert Odyssey," at the Kathleen Ewing Gallery Adriel Heisey's images of the American West are almost as striking as Everton's, which were shown only a few months earlier at the same gallery. Unlike many other chroniclers of the West, Heisey demonstrates that man's footprint on the land is not by definition disastrous. In Heisey's hands, for instance, an overhead image of four speeding motorboats on a green body of water becomes a gorgeous and delicate tableau that approximates a passel of soaring butterflies.

7. "In Response to Place: Photographs From the Nature Conservancy's Last Great Places," at the Corcoran Gallery of Art Many of the high-profile contributors to this multiartist show submitted mediocre work, but the exhibition, on view until Dec. 31, includes a few certifiable gems. Hope Sandrow's half-submerged images of Indonesia's Komodo National Park—printed in segments in a room-long horizontal format—are both technically innovative and visually bracing. Richard Misrach's large-scale photographs of water and sand dunes in Nevada exude a meditative peacefulness. Sally Mann used an old camera with a cracked lens to capture a deserted Mexican beach, and Mary Ellen Mark empathetically documented the forlorn inhabitants of Virginia's Eastern Shore and Alaska's Pribilof Islands.

8. "In Like a Lion Out Like a Lamb," at the Kathleen Ewing Gallery This is surely the least ambitious show on this list, yet "Lion/Lamb" merits kudos for sheer inventiveness. Crammed into the Ewing Gallery's tiny confines were 51 images, including many vintage snapshots by anonymous photographers. The only thread linking them was that they all featured lions or lambs. The idea is whimsical to the point of fluffiness, but the sheer variety of the images in the exhibition exemplified a skilled and creative curatorial mind at work.

9. "Amy Lamb: Recent Work," at the David Adamson Gallery Lamb, a Washington-based scientist-turned-photographer, makes meticulously planned close-up images of flowers. But unlike masters of black-and-white botanical images such as Karl Blossfeldt and Tom Baril, Lamb brings her flowers' colors to life. The twist works strikingly well: Some images feature hyperreal yellows and greens worthy of cake icing; others capture unusual checkered patterns or petals shaped like pine cones.

10. "Vaughn Sills: One Family—An Extended Portrait in Photographs and in Their Own Words," at American University's Watkins Gallery Since 1979, Sills—a photography professor at Simmons College in Boston—has documented the Toole clan of rural Georgia. The Tooles, a virtual catalog of familial dysfunction, received unblinking yet humane treatment from Sills, in words as well as images. The show was most affecting when viewers traced the slow maturation of the children and the subtle aging of the adults. Sills' series is a worthy successor to a long line of documentary work about impoverished families in Appalachia.

Other exhibitions that came close to cracking the top 10 include those of Betsy Stewart's dreamily translucent photograms of fruits and flowers at the Troyer Gallery, Anthony Goicolea's digitally manipulated images of himself playing bad boys at the Corcoran (on view through Dec. 30), Felice Frankel's microscope-aided scientific photographs at the National Academy of Sciences, and Hiroshi Osaka's atmospheric Japanese landscapes at Kathleen Ewing.

A few individual contributions to group shows merit mention as well. A small handful of surrealistic reflections from André Kertész's inexplicably ignored Distortion series stole the show at the Corcoran's "André Kertész and Theodore Fried: Away From Home." Karin Rosenthal's nude portraits masquerading as landscapes similarly stood out in the Fraser Gallery's "The Figure in Photography." And the inclusion of William Christenberry's Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1974–2001 and The Bar-B-Q Inn, Greensboro, Alabama, 1971–1991—two elegiac photographic arrays of crumbling Southern buildings—elevated Hemphill Fine Arts' small and otherwise unambitious exhibition of his work.

Despite the display of such worthy work, I feel confident in saying that no gallery show this year can top either of the two photography books published recently by artists with ties to the Washington area. One is local photographer Maxwell MacKenzie's American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape—images of gracefully decaying Western barns that were first exhibited two years ago at the American Institute of Architects. The other is Shepard Sherbell's Soviets: Pictures From the End of the U.S.S.R. Sherbell (like me, a contributor to the National Journal) captured the essence of life in the crumbling Soviet Union through a remarkable combination of images and words.

A hopeful note: Three major photographic shows will open in
Washington next June. An Edward Weston show at the Phillips will be joined by an Alfred Stieglitz retrospective at the NGA and a collection of images that the Hirshhorn is classifying, somewhat cryptically, as "street photographs." Until then, though, it could be a long and exasperating few months in the local museums for those looking for photography. CP