Karen Dalton, whose magnificent album '1966,' has very recently been issued on Delmore Recordings is a true original. Her unique voice, her idiosyncratic interpretations of compositions by the likes of Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, and her own inflected and infected songs, marks her as an artist of the first degree.
So why do so few people know about her? It's difficult and surprisingly easy to guess. Dalton's life was one marked by personal and artistic struggle - often, with the music playing second fiddle (awful pun intended) to her personal demons - her recording career was sporadic, with only two albums released in her lifetime.
'1966' is a marvellous record. Essentially a rehearsal tape, it includes full-throated, open-armedrenditions of songs old and new - and criminally undiscovered - by an artist at the peak of her considerable powers.
2011 was a standout year for non-fiction books of all misshapes and argumentative sizes...it's even more difficult to put these into critical context than it is fiction writing.
Nevertheless...
Norton publishing released R P Crease's marvellous 'World in the Balance;' a history of weights and measures, their attribution and their adoption, or not, by various countries. Or not. Crease makes a potentially dry subject highly amusing, fun even, emphasising the differences, highlighting the similarities. Hell, there's even a section on brassiere measurement - and that's incontrovertibly no bad thing.
'Hemingway's Boat,' as reviewed by Allan Massie, is as quixotic a read as the man himself. Tremendously entertaining, the book is, in many ways, similar to Hemingway's own, 'A Moveable Feast,' written when he was a young objet d'art living in Paris (the book begins after Papa's formative years spent carousing there).
What differentiates Paul Hendrickson's book from so many other biographies is that it counterbalances the warts and the all of a man often beleaguered by life, at odds with his crucial self, with his headstrong humanity - in all its rumbustiousness.
Paul Shaw has written a delightful book about an even more delightful subject - the New York City Subway System or, more specifically, its signage. For years, New York's underground signs were an indecipherable mess; difficult to read, nigh impossible to follow. Impeccably researched and gracefully written, it's the story of how a font changed a small, imperfectly formed part of the world for the better and to a new way of seeing.
Jon Ronson has written a number of entertaining, enlightening and informative books. Ronson's latest, 'The Psychopath Test,' follows in these footsteps - albeit following them wearing a pinstriped suit, a pair of Trickers brogues and a mePad. Above all, as Ronson says and writes, it shows how eager many of us are to recognise the marks of madness in other people, and to steadfastly ignore these hallmarks in ourselves.
In closing, it would be impossible not to mention Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon's magnificent 'Day Tripper,' published by Vertigo. Undoubtedly one of THE books of this or any other year, the story, unlike so many graphic novels, grabs and gripes you from the start and never lets go - Ba and Moon have been rightly compared to another Vertigo alumnus, Neil Gaiman; both in terms of story-telling and, crucially, realisation - but their visions are undoubtedly their own.
So, finally, an end to 2011. And a beginning to 2012.
No matter what film historians, movie magazine editors, ordinary Joe's and Jolene's may say about 2011 and its movies, there is a tacitly accepted truism that, every year, about five films are released - usually quietly, often unassumingly - that will stand the test of celluloid time.
2011 is no different.
This year's LA Confidential award goes to Nicholas Winding Refn for his less than subtle re-working (and all the better for it) of 80's Noirishness in 'Drive.' Ryan Gosling, despite some slightly deluded critical comparisons to Steve McQueen, holds the film together nicely.
For those of us more solipsistically inclined, Michel Hazanivicius's 'The Artist,' may well be the film of 2011 - despite it's release date being, um, yesterday... Disney matter. Fans of cinema have been waiting for a film like this for years and, in its unsentimental melodramatic depiction of 1920's Hollywood, the unchecked hubris of its stars and the system they were so in thrall to, the movie compellingly convinces - with an authenticity seldom seen in film-making today.
In terms of sheer spectacle, little came close to startling the senses more than Werner Herzog's 'Cave of forgotten dreams.' It's a film which, quite literally, stops you in your tracks, quietly, yet insistently, caressing your heart with its inspiring message of wonder...
Similarly, from South Korea...
And, from one of the great American movie makers...
Penultimately, another film about the transmigration of the soul...with goats...
In 2011, film fans were also treated to that rarest of things - a television programme about films that was as good as the films that it celebrated. 'The Story of Film,' written and directed by Mark Cousins, was an unbridled joy from start to finish - taking us across time and vividly transacted space, across genres and continents, into the hearts, the minds and the mouths of directors, cinematographers, actors, visionaries.
It is worth spending some of your life watching it.
