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Top 10 of 2003
By Leonard Pierce
 1.
Album (Hip-Hop): Prefuse 73 — One Word Extinguisher.
There’s hip-hop DJs and there’s techno DJs, and no matter
how fast they race side by side, never the twain shall meet, right?
Right. But goddamned if Scott Herren isn’t doing the best
he can to pave a merge lane between them. Mixing innovative breakbeats
and crunchy, diffused hip-hop production with sleek, clever techno
tinkering, Prefuse 73 is already pointing in the direction that
underground rap will be headed a year or two from now. Equally satisfying
to discriminating fans of hip-hop’s experimental side and
techno’s intellectual tendencies, One Word Extinguisher
is club without being cold and street without being stupid. Scott
Herren, like a lot of innovative hip-hop heads, is more appreciated
in Europe than in the U.S., and that’s a damn shame: guest
rapper Mr. Lif knows what time it is, and so should you.
Runner-up: Viktor Vaughn — Vaudeville
Villain. It seemed impossible that the artist formerly
known as MF Doom could follow up the phenomenal Operation:
Doomsday album with anything remotely as great, but here’s
the proof.
 2.
Album (Rock/Pop): Guster — Keep It Together.
After the release of Lost and Gone Forever, it seemed like
the underappreciated Boston trio was, well, lost and gone forever.
The album was their first on a major label, and, as with so many
other good bands who got their big break, it seemed like it would
be their last. It was a masterpiece, but it was met with relative
indifference and might have spelled the end for the too-talented.
However, Keep It Together gives them another chance to make
it as big as they deserve; it’s an equally amazing album,
but in an entirely different, low-key vein. Bringing Joe Pisapia
into the fold gave them a great voice, a rootsy touch and a pair
of memorable songs (“Jesus on the Radio” and “Careful”),
and “Amsterdam” is hands-down one of the most amazing
singles of the year. This record should, but won’t, make them
superstars.
Runner-up: The Weakerthans — Reconstruction
Site. Winnepeg-based genre-futzers continue to progress,
fusing punk-metal, indie-crush and a bit of Canadiana with
dazzlingly literate, close-cutting lyrics.
 3.
Book (Fiction): John Banville — Shroud. “The
name, my name, is Axel Vander, on that much I insist.” But
it’s a false insistence, or at least it may be: Axel Vander
is, first and foremost, a liar. He is a writer and a professor of
literature, but he is also a walking falsehood, an embodiment of
untruth, and late in life, he may be finally exposed for what he
truly is — whatever that may be. Written in incredibly skillful,
intelligent prose by the literary editor of the Irish Times, this
is a novel of ideas that never lets them overwhelm the story, a
novel that brings new meaning to the idea of the unreliable narrator
(and the unreliable writer). Vander is a towering character (based,
fascinatingly, on literary theorist Paul De Man), and the book is
a fantastic treatment of themes of identity and deception by a master
stylist.
Runner-up: Khaled Hosseini — The
Kite Runner. The first novel by an Afghan novelist
to be written in English, The Kite Runner is a flawed
but powerful and emotionally weighty novel of generations in
Afghanistan and how that country’s tragic history affects
them all.
 4.
Book (Non-fiction): Azar Nafisi — Reading Lolita in
Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Reading Lolita in Tehran,
a deft combination of memoir and literary criticism by a female
university professor in Iran, is the kind of book that could easily
go astray. The story of how she gathered seven of her best female
students to study selected classics of literature could easily have
become hollow “life-affirming” claptrap about the power
of art to transform and improve. In fact, it does have much to say
about art’s transcendent qualities, but without a trace of
hollowness or cliché. Fascinating as memoir — the way
the girls view books like Lolita and Daisy Miller
through the lens of life in an Islamic theocracy is an intriguing
cultural study, and Nafisi’s accounts of trying to focus on
the books while Iraqi bombs fell on her city is gripping —
it also works quite well as literary criticism, offering particularly
keen insights into Nabokov’s masterpiece from the eyes of
an Islamic feminist writer.
Runner-up: Michael Lewis — Moneyball:
The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Time will tell if
the Oakland A’s can stop choking, or if Beaneball proves
as groundbreaking as Lewis clearly hopes it is. But whatever
the case, this is an essential study in the science and economics
of baseball.
 5.
Comic (Mainstream): James Sturm and Guy Davis — The Fantastic
Four: Unstable Molecules. The comics press (and plenty of fans,
myself included) were taken by surprise when James Sturm, the writer
and artist behind the brilliant 2001 indie graphic novel The Golem’s
Mighty Swing, announced that he’d be taking on “comics’
greatest foursome” in a Marvel miniseries. It ended up paying
tremendous dividends — artistically speaking, at least. Unstable
Molecules, a difficult, disturbing, postmodernist reimagining of
the origin of the Fantastic Four, didn’t sell well and wasn’t
gladly received by Marvel zombies, but it’s an incredibly
rewarding piece of work — dense and multi-layered, telling
a very real and compelling story on the surface and saying a lot
of insightful and intelligent things about comics themselves below.
Unjustly overlooked, Unstable Molecules deserves to find an audience.
Runner-up: Jason Hall and Cliff Chiang — Beware
the Creeper. Another unfairly slept-on miniseries, this one
from DC: the Creeper, in this version a mysterious woman, emerges
from the artistic and political hotbed of Paris and solves a
murder-mystery among the Surrealists.
 6.
Comic (Independent): Al Columbia and Ethan Persoff — The
Pogostick. Al Columbia is up there with Jim Woodring and Bob
Burden as one of comics’ great eccentrics; in Ethan Persoff,
he has found a kindred spirit and a perfect collaborator. Although
the format of The Pogostick is naggingly reminiscent of Chris Ware’s
perfect Acme Comics — unconventional formatting, emotionally
dead people in front of vibrantly alive backgrounds, hapless characters
unable to express their inner torment — Columbia and Persoff
differentiate themselves with a nasty jolt of sick humor and singularly
memorable protagonist in Audrey Grinfield, the demented but reticent
design proofer who in many ways is the anti-Jim Corrigan. Published
by Fantagraphics and drawn in a bizarre, flat style that unnerves
and intrigues, The Pogostick is alternately hilarious and heinous,
and a great introduction to Columbia.
Runner-up: Marjane Satrapi — Persepolis:
The Story of a Childhood. Funny, sickening, honest and charmingly
illustrated, Satrapi’s memoir of growing up during the
Iranian Revolution is never sentimental or sappy. Can be read
to fine effect as a companion piece to Reading Lolita in Tehran.
 7.
Movie (Fiction): Elephant. Inexplicable, unformed,
inconclusive and possibly pointless: these criticisms can be applied
to a great deal of Gus Van Sant’s work, and they certainly
apply here in spades. And yet it’s one of the most compelling
films I’ve seen in years, one of those movies in which almost
nothing happens while, at the same time, one gets the sense that
nearly everything is happening right before your eyes, if only you
watch closely enough. Best described as a free-form imaginative
conception of the day of a Columbine-style high school massacre,
Elephant is elegant and elegiac and utterly incomprehensible:
it shows us everything and tells us nothing, just like life. Largely
improvised dialogue and naturalistic acting from a young cast of
unknowns gives Elephant a remarkably disturbing verité
feel. Once seen, impossible to forget.
Runner-up: 21 Grams. On first
viewing, I was less than impressed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s
first English-language film; it seemingly lacked the coherence
and drive of Amores Perros. But on second look, the tremendous
acting and inventive structure carried the day.
 8.
Movie (Documentary): The Fog of War. Errol Morris
has long been America’s premier documentary filmmaker, a director
with the rare gift of making a difference and a storyteller who
forces us to look at intrinsic aspects of our own national character
that we’d generally be more comfortable not recognizing. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in his latest, a series of interviews
with Robert McNamara, the architect of America’s Vietnam policy
as the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara’s
measured reminiscences — it’s unfair, perhaps, to call
them confessions — embody the title of the film perfectly,
and remind us that those at the top of the chain of command are
as susceptible to muddied thinking about war as the men in the field.
Offering no easy answers — perhaps no answers at all —
The Fog of War does at least ask timely questions.
Runner-up: Capturing the Friedmans.
Andrew Jarecki’s messy, ambiguous, ugly documentary about
a high school teacher and his son, charged with child molestation
in the 1980s. Nothing is clear — not even the intent of the
filmmakers — in this look at crime and how we respond to
it.
 9.
Live Show: Hella. With only two instruments on stage —
a drum kit that looks like it was designed for a retarded youngster
and then run through a trash compacter and a single guitar with
almost no effects — northern California’s Hella makes
some of the most hellacious noise I’ve ever heard. The instrumental
duo, consumed with energy, gurning nasty faces at each other, and
working in breathtaking synchronicity, play a unique blend of technofied
guitar-rock and spasmodic, herky-jerky free jazz. Aside from their
uncanny togetherness, alarming tightness and sheer dynamics, Hella
is fast — they play with such breakneck intensity that you
fear one or the other of them is going to drop dead at any moment.
But hope that they don’t: if you catch them on tour, I can
guarantee it will be the most jaw-dropping show you see all year.
 10.
Television Show: “Arrested Development.” Only
half a season old, it’s perhaps too soon to judge this new
Fox sitcom a success or a failure, but if new shows are measured
by their potential, this one has already won. The story of attempts
by the scion of a wealthy Orange County real estate family to hold
house and home together after the father is sent to prison for securities
fraud, “Arrested Development” has tons of great satirical
fodder, top-notch writing that dangles endless bits of plot at us
and manages to resolve each one with a killer joke at the end of
each episode, a willingness to take risks both topically and structurally,
and an absolutely top-shelf cast, including dead-on performances
by Jessica Walter, Portia de Rossi and the always-excellent Jeffrey
Tambor — and, not incidentally, the best use of David Cross
outside of “Mr. Show” so far.
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