Talking Pat Sajak Union Blues

The picture is the only photograph of Thomas Pynchon I've ever seen. He doesn't really look like an enigmatic literary genius who only breaks his reclusive tendencies to appear on The Simpsons, does he? At any rate, it has nothing to do with anything, just something I grabbed off of Wikipedia months ago when I was looking for random pictures to illustrate this humble blog.

Okay. So, I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and listening to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album. I have the television muted and on ABC, because I don't want to forget that I'm planning on watching the new episode of Lost at 9:00. (I know there' a State game on, but I don't think I want to watch it. I'm not overly pessmistic, but Duke is Duke. They get more tv time than Leave it to Beaver re-runs [Gods, don't we all miss Pete Gillen on some subatomic level?]. And although State's bigs should be able to dominate Duke in the paint, Duke's ability to force turnovers and run up the score with their Phoenix Suns offense manages to exploit almost all of State's weaknesses at the same time.) I also realize that the fact that I have to set the channel a good two hours before the episode begins doesn't exactly imply that I really want to watch the episode. But I don't watch much network television, so I have a hard time remembering exactly when shows are on. This is what happens when the majority of television you watch is actually on DVD (which is a much more satisfying way of watching most television series, it just means that you can't talk about the show until months after most people have seen them. But this is alright, since most of my friends don't watch that much television either.)

Anyway, Wheel of Fortune is on the television, but I don't really notice it until I reach the end of the essay where Klosterman argues that Empire Strikes Back set the tone for Gen-X. When I look up at the end of the chapter, they're doing the final puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. The category is something like "Fictional Characters" or whatever, and even after Pat Sajak spotted the contestant the letters, it was completely unclear what the answer was. And it turned out that the answer was "Happy and Grumpy". And this is fucking bullshit. I haven't watched an episode of Wheel of Fortune since I was in middle school, at the most recent, but everyone understands that the answers have to be idiomatic if they are multiple words. If the answer had been "Batman & Robin", that would be fine. Everyone associates the two. And if the answer had been "The Seven Dwarfs", that would be fine too. But who the hell would ever guess "Happy and Grumpy"? I thought that I didn't watch Wheel of Fortune because it was too easy. Now I know that I don't watch it because it doesn't play fair.


This weekend, I intend to go see either Juno or There Will Be Blood, depending on whether or not I feel like going to Cary (and, I suppose, on whether or not the theaters don't change the movies they are showing too drastically.) I have a stack of new music books to get through, which have pushed the Nabokov book that I put on top of my bookshelf a few weeks ago in order to motivate myself to go ahead and read it. But a monograph about the first Velvet Underground album or Johnny Cash's second autobiography seem more immediately interesting, even if they are less fulfilling for me as a person.

Talking Union Blues

According to the Washington Post's Reliable Source, Arlo Guthrie has endorsed Ron Paul for president. This bothers me. His reasoning, that Paul would have been the only candidate who would have signed the Constitution in 1787 is flat out ridiculous. (Although I can believe that Huckabee wouldn't have been willing to go along with the First Amendment). And this is simply a slap in the face to what his father, Woody, stood for. Woody Guthrie was a socialist and stalwart union supporter, who would have written songs decrying Paul's racist newsletters and libertarian economic policies. He would have supported either Obama or Edwards, out of the main candidates.

I've never considered Arlo to be the world's smartest guy, but I gave him more credit than this.

Talking TV Union Blues

Okay. I'm getting a slight bit of happiness from watching the effects of the writers' strike on the programming of the few shows that I actually bother to watch on network television. Take tonight's House, for example. It was the bloody Christmas episode. Why didn't they air it at Christmas? Presumably because Fox only had three episodes of the show left (at least, that's what I've read.) and television ratings for regular shows are somewhat lower around Christmas. So, given only three episodes of one of the higher-rated shows on television, Fox decides to sit on them for a while. But then, someone makes the seemingly strange decision to put an episode of House on after the Superbowl, which I thought was usually a spot for introducing a new show. Now, Fox can't very well air the Christmas episode after the Superbowl, which takes place in godsdamned February. It would look ridiculous. And House this season seems to have just enough of an ongoing story arch that they want to keep the episodes in order. So, with (allegedly) only three episodes of the show left, Fox is forced to burn through one precious episode of the show in order to show another episode after the Superbowl (a quick sidetrip- the Superbowl represents the greatest success that marketers have ever pulled off. For one night a year, people forget that they always change the channel during advertisements, and some bastards actually watch what is usually a boring football game for the specific purpose of watching commercials. How fucked up is that? 364 days of the year and they dislike ads, but for one night, it's almost one's duty as an American to take notes about which commercial "won". Right now, the only part of the Superbowl I expect to watch is the Tom Petty show at halftime.) and that's how Fox wound up deciding to use up two-thirds of their House episodes in less than a week.

Tonight's episode was almost pretty good. It wasn't, in no small part because the new staff is so fucking boring, but I could see the places where a good episode almost broke through (hint- it was in the clinic storyline, and the looks exchanged during the last scene.) During the episode, I was thinking about how House just might be the most formulaic show on television. It's still one of my favorites, but that's entirely because Hugh Laurie is such a fantastic actor.

The next thing I'm planning on watching on television is the new season of Lost, which I think starts on Thursday. I've only watched the show on DVD, and I have a feeling that only watching one episode of the show a week will be irritating. The show is often so intentionally byzantine and frustrating, that without the instant gratification of watching two or three episodes in a row, I might actually wind up just waiting for the DVDs for this season. Although the writers' strike could very well fuck all of that up anyway.

Shaggy Dog Stories For A new Millenium

I've never been able to shake the feeling that I'm part of a generation that suffers from a profound case of arrested development (by which I don't mean a) the best American sitcom post-Seinfeld or b)the rap group that I'm fairly certain is my friend James' all-time favorite hip hop act). Maybe it's something that we inherited from the bastards in generation-X. And it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what I mean. Part of it is when a movie like Transformers comes out, and people like my future brother-in-law (a genuinely intelligent person, albeit with occasionally questionable taste) are legitimately excited about seeing it- way more excited than they are for equivalent Hollywood summer epics. Part of it is the proliferation of cell phone ring tones based on 8-bit video games. Maybe this is actually the case for every generation that grows up in a media-saturated environment, but it seems like my peers are getting nostalgic at far too young of an age. And maybe I'm entirely mistaken. Gods only know just how far my fingers are from the pulse of society (you'd think reading Entertainment Weekly would have me more up to date, but I always skip the parts on celebrities who aren't Levon Helm or Lupe Fiasco, and since they aren't really even celebrities- well, you see how it all falls apart).

And while I've been able to avoid things like the MySpace and Guitar Hero that people who I happen to share a demographic with are drawn to like those birds that collect shiny things, I fear that I'm marching in a complete fucking lockstep with part of the arrested development thing. I mean, why else do I spend more time playing old games on the Virtual Console than I do on actual Wii games?

Sure, there are perfectly reasonable explanations that can function without the assumption of any sort of nostalgia- I'm mostly playing games that I never had on their original consoles- games like Super Metroid and Paper Mario and Actraiser. And the Wii has suffered from a lack of quality titles that aren't collections of minigames or ports of Playstation 2 games. But, given that I had 700 points left on the card that I got for Christmas, why oh why did I download the original Super Mario Brothers? I mean, I played the hell out of this game on the original NES. I already have like five Mario games in one form or another for the Wii. Six, maybe, now that I think about it. So, why did I download it? I'm worried that I did it simple for the nostalgia of it, and that's what is annoying me. God help me if they ever put the NHL game for the Genesis onto the system- I'll probably spend revert right back to spending all my time listening to Nevermind and trying to have a perfect season with the Chicago Blackhawks.

Anyway, all of this was just misdirection. I was actually thinking about my own arrested development earlier today, long before I surprised myself by downloading the damned game. What happened was, I went out this morning and got my drivers license. It took nine damned years, and two failed tests, but I finally got the fucking thing. Which puts me ahead of David Sedaris and Alfred Hitchcock (actually, Hitchcock might have had a license, but in Donald Spoto's biography of the greatest director who ever lived, he wrote that Hitchcock never drove at all, mostly because he had an overwhelming fear of being pulled over. There's a longer story behind that, and it actually goes a long way towards informing viewings of most of the Hitchcock's films, but that's really not my point. I don't know what my exact point is, just that it almost certainly has very little to do with Strangers on a Train), but behind the idiot teenagers in my neighborhood who have yet to realize that lacrosse is a stupid sport played by people who aspire to be Maryland fans. I don't know what that means, I just know that it's fucking true. They all secretly want to be Nik Caner-Medley. And Nik Caner-Medley doesn't want to be Nik Caner-Medley. He wanted to be a fucking lacrosse player.

Changing the subject, I spent a few hours this weekend (after I finished Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men during commercial breaks while watching the NCSU/FSU game but before I made a noble but flawed effort at making beef stroganoff) catching up with the Filthy Critic. I haven't read Filthy since last summer, and it had been even longer since I really spent time with the man who is almost certainly the finest film critic on the internet tubes(I say this with no sarcasm or irony whatsoever. I don't agree with a lot of his opinions, but his work is never boring and almost always genuinely insightful. His style means that you often have to work a bit to realize that he isn't simply funny, but fucking close to brilliant. I'm serious.) I love that he gave Kings of Kong the incredibly elusive "five fingers". It's out on DVD now, and if you haven't seen it, you really should check it out. It's probably my favorite documentary since American Movie, (although I'm having a hard time remembering that many documentaries I've liked this decade. The Aristocrats and Lost In La Mancha both come to mind, but that's about it. Super Size Me and Bowling For Columbine were both all right, but both were also very deeply flawed as films.) I'd fucking love for someone from the Oscars to try and explain how Kong wasn't even fucking nominated. But then again, this is the award ceremony that honored the terrible Fahrenheit 911 and ignored Hoop Dreams. They aren't as bad as the Grammys at giving out statues to people, but they aren't particularly skilled at it, when you get right down to it. Oh, that's right. I loved Beyond The Mat, and that came out in 2000. That was my favorite documentary since American Movie. Kings of Kong is probably better than Beyond the Mat, actually. It's a close call, at least.

Science Fiction Punk Rock Theater

I downloaded an album from eMusic that I've become oddly fascinated with. It's a collection of current punk bands covering the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack. Now, Green Day is the only punk band from the last twenty years or so that I've paid any real attention to, and I haven't given RHPS much thought since high school, but I found the concept so interesting that I didn't really feel like I had much of a choice about downloading it. And it is remarkably fascinating. There's a certain logic to the whole thing- Rocky Horror was almost punk before punk really existed after all, but the execution of the entire thing is pretty impressive, especially for a collection of bands of which I had only heard of two of them.

When I heard that Heath Ledger had died, I eventually realized that I couldn't think of a single one of his films that I had seen. It turns out that I have seen one movie he was in (Monster's Ball, but the only things I remember from it are Puff Daddy being executed at the beginning and Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton grinding on the floor). Brokeback Mountain has been on the increasingly long list of movies I've been meaning to see, but I have no idea when I'll eventually get around to it (My Netflix queue is over 80 movies long, and I've been trying not to add things to it.)

The show last night was really good, although it only lasted a little over half an hour. The weather wasn't as bad as I had feared, and I was dismissed from jury duty. (Which is a little annoying. I mean, they were after me for like two years to serve, and when they finally had me, they simply wasted a few minutes of my time for a few evenings and then said they didn't want me. I guess not everything means something)

Sifting Through The Wreckage

It was about ten years ago, when Titanic won best picture over Boogie Nights, L.A. Confidential, As Good As It Gets, Good Will Hunting, Jackie Brown, The Full Monty and four or five other superior films, that I first promised myself I wouldn't get upset about the crimes of the Oscars. Since then, my resolve has been tested by the awards several times- Russell Crowe not winning for several amazing performances (although he did win for a less amazing performance in Gladiator), Daniel Day-Lewis somehow not winning for Gangs of New York, Gladiator beating Traffic for best picture, I could go on. So, true to that spirit, I'm not upset by a couple of really puzzling Oscar nominations. But I will mention the two that I noticed.

Best Animated Feature- Surf's Up gets nominated but the Simpsons movie doesn't. Really? Really? We all know that this award is Ratatouille's, (although I'm sure Persepolis is fantastic) but really?

Best Song- Enchanted got three nominations. Fucking Three. Eddie Vedder was shut out after winning the Golden Globe. I understand that this award exists to give Disney films Oscars. Hell, Mary Poppins beat the songs from A Hard Day's Night. If the Beatles didn't have a chance, then I suppose Eddie didn't either. (You might remember that Phil Collins got himself an Oscar in this category for a song from Tarzan. That's all I'm going to say).

Going to the Cradle tonight, where I'll freeze my ass of for probably at least an hour waiting in line to get in. Free shows are awesome and all, but I'd really prefer to pay the fifteen or so dollars and not have to wait in line when it's about 30 degrees outside. I'll probably write something about it tomorrow if I don't have jury duty. (If the Feds do decide to bring me in, it would be on the morning after I get home at 1:30 in the morning.)

I have to say it was a good day.

It snowed a little bit.
UNC lost.
Huckabee lost.
State won with a Gavin Grant play I still only half believe really happened.
Cat's Cradle scheduled a Brother Ali show.

Happiness is kind of alright, as it turns out.

Last Thoughts on Bobby Fisher

"In ceremonies of the horsemen
Even the pawn must hold a grudge"
-Bob Dylan, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"

"Lolita and Bobby Fisher
Country no part is red
Just black and white
Humphrey Bogart is dead"
-Buck 65, " 1957"


Bobby Fisher is dead.

He was not a good person. He believed in horrible, vile things. He was an anti-Semite, he publicly lauded the September 11th attacks. He defied sanctions put in place to punish the genocidal dictator Slobodan Milosevic. When he was a young man, sportswriter Dick Schaap befriended Fisher, taking him to Knicks games and acting as a sort of father figure to the young genius. Later in his life, Fisher told Schaap son's Jeremy that his father was "a typical Jewish snake". There is no good reason to mourn Fisher's death. But there is a great deal to consider about his life.

The sheer amount of symbolism and apparent cliches that comprise Fisher's life can be daunting. First, he was the classic child prodigy- a champion and grandmaster in his teens- in the mold of Mozart or Rimbaud or LeBron James. He was a symbol of the Cold War- his now legendary victory over Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972 is as much a milestone of the athletic side of the Cold War as the Miracle on Ice in 1980, or the theft of the gold medal from the United States in basketball in the Munich games. He was a national hero, if only briefly. He is the insane genius- like Nabokov's Luzhin, or Van Gogh or John Forbes Nash. He is the recluse, who dropped out of the public eye , like J.D. Salinger. He is the self-hating Jew (his mother was Jewish, although Fisher he denied being Jewish, much as he denied the Holocaust), the conspiracy theorist, the man without a country for the last fifteen years of his life.

He also played chess. He might be the greatest chess player ever. When I was younger and played chess, I studied his book, Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess, and imitated the way he held his hands over his face in a picture. I still do, although now only because of 16 or so years of habit.
I quit playing chess, mostly because I realized that I'm not patient enough to be good at it, but whenever I saw a newspaper article on the increasingly tragic genius, I would read it. His story began to combine the mythic and the pathetic in such large portions that I could no more ignore it than I could ignore a classical tragedy, at least, until the mythic portion was so utterly devoured by the pathetic that observing Fisher became little different from watching a particularly nasty car wreck.

Bobby Fisher's life included a great many things worth mourning- what might be seen ultimately as his talent being largely wasted and his humanity being gradually destroyed. But I see little point in mourning Fisher's death.

Beatniks Are Out To Make It Rich

So, I just got a 25 dollar iTunes card as a late Christmas present. I haven't used the whole thing yet, but I've already bought a somewhat eclectic selection of songs- Donovan's "Season of the Witch", Creed Bratton's (from The Office) "Spinnin N Reelin", Iggy Pop's "Search and Destroy" and I finally got Rivers Cuomo's Home Recordings. I've only listened to a few tracks off of that one so far, but the critics who said its the best thing he's put out since Pinkerton seem to be correct. If I ever get married, I don't see how "I Was Made For you" isn't the song for the first dance.

When History Was Written The Final Page Will Say

It's weird, but I actually have been much more diligent in watching Jon Stewart every night since his return than I was before the strike. The show is certainly not better without writers, but maybe I just find it to be much more impressive now. On the other hand, I've lost most of my interest in Colbert without writers. This probably isn't surprising or noteworthy, and yet I feel the need to record it.

I've been trying to think of the upside of what happened tonight in South Carolina, and what I came up with is this. Things can only get a little worse for NCSU basketball at this point. That's the new optimism.

The only other (slightly) interesting thing in my life is that the Feds keep on fucking around with me. Since I got the summons for jury duty, I've had to call this telephone number four or five different times, each time being told to call back the next day/next week/whatever. I got a letter from them over the weekend telling me to call tonight, and tonight I was told to call back on Friday night. Next week is the last week of the three week span I was summoned for, and after they spent so long trying to get me, it would kind of be a shame if they wasted their moment. That, and I want some of that sweet jury duty pay.

I like the George Bush quote I stole for my title from the daily show, mainly because it feels so much like a line from a song. Once I figure out who's song it sounds like it could be from, I'll be really pleased with myself.

Roll The Dice Just One More Time

I actually watched part of the Golden Globes last night, for the first time that I can ever remember. And I thought that the format was actually brilliant. As you might know, because of the Writers' Strike, the ceremony consisted of nothing but people at a podium reading the nominees and then announcing the winner. No red carpet, no speeches by people who I don't care about, no musical numbers. It was kind of awesome, in a boring sort of way. I was glad to see Eddie Vedder finally win something, and I'm glad Extras won an award (how The Sopranos was shut out is confusing to me, and I'm a little surprised that House was even nominated for a somewhat mediocre season.) But the larger point is that it turns out that celebrities were ruining award shows almost as much as the people who vote for awards shows.

Speaking of celebrities, it turns out they, much like our favorite athletes, are juicing. The only named perfromance enhancer I actually respect on any level is Wyclef, and I've only really paid attention to his work with the Fugees (although I believe Keith has said that some of his solo stuff is worth listening to). I'm desperately hoping that when it comes to putting these people into their respective halls of fame, or getting stars on the sidewalk in LA, the voters hold their steroid use against them, because that would be hilarious. The next frontier for drug cheats has to be politics, right? Because juicing presidential candidates will be even more awesome than Ron Paul's remarkably racist newsletters. My favorite part is where he says that young African Americans are brought up to "fight the power". I can only imagine Ron Paul watching Do The Right Thing and cheering when the cops kill Radio Raheem.

I still don't want to talk about what happened in Chapel Hill on Saturday. I still think this team can come together and salvage this season, but... I don't know how to finish that sentence. I do know that watching the knee-jerk reactions at the statefansnation message board was pretty funny. I like the people who want to ditch Sidney Lowe and bring back Herb Sendek best of all.

No Country For Old Men

I finally saw it today. It's fantastic. Easily the best film I've seen in a long time, and one of the most depressing films I've seen in a long time. The Coen brothers, who seemed to have lost their way after The Man Who Wasn't There are finally back on track.
There Will Be Blood is supposed to finally make it to the triangle on Friday, so hopefully I'll get a chance to see it in the theater. Juno is the other movie I really would like to see at the moment.

NERDS! (who have been drinking)

You know, most people would never wonder if the guys responsible for the comic strip Penny Arcade have ever seen Clerks. It's when I realize things like that, that's when I begin to question exactly how much of my life/mind I've wasted.

Let me backtrack. There's a web comic strip called Penny Arcade, about video games. It's much nerdier about video games than I am, so sometimes I don't really understand exactly what they are talking about, but it's almost always really funny. And the guys who do the comic strip also do a podcast. While I was walking Dylan tonight (for those who haven't met him, yes, the family's Labrador Retriever is named for Robert Allen Zimmerman. Don't act like you are surprised.) I was listening to the aforementioned Penny Arcade podcast. The two writers were talking about a Star Wars novel that one of them had read about the construction of the Death Star. The conversation turned to the fate of all of the non-Imperial people on the Death Star when Luke Skywalker blew it up- all of the service industry guys who didn't have any political stake in the galactic civil war. If this sounds familiar, it's because Dante and Randall have this exact same conversation in Clerks. Anyone who has seen Clerks ten or twenty times like I have will immediately recognize that. But the Penny Arcade guys, while having a conversation almost indistinguishable from the one in Clerks, never comment on this fact. This is now what is eating at me.

Look at it this way. Who watches Kevin Smith films? Nerds, of one sort of another. Yes, some people who aren't nerds happen to see his films, but as a rule, Kevin Smith films are the domain of nerds. (Being one of the nerdiest people I know, I'm allowed to use the n-word like this. My only hope/consolation is that I'm more like the nerds in High Fidelity than the ones at Star Trek conventions. At least, that's what I tell myself. But how nerdy do I get? Last night, when I was thinking about asking this girl I know if she wanted to go to the Pharoahe Monch show, I couldn't stop thinking about Weezer lyrics. "I asked you to go the Green Day concert/You say you never heard of them/How cool is that?". That's pretty nerdy. ) So why haven't the Penny Arcade guys, leaders of the nerd pack, familiarr with Clerks? If they are familiar with the film, why don't they mention Clerks during their conversation? I suppose the most likely explanation is that they have seen Clerks, but maybe only once or twice, and don't actually remember the Death Star conversation in Clerks. Still, it bothered me. And the fact that I was bothered by the lack of a Kevin Smith reference during a conversation about Star Wars while listening to a video game podcast scares the living hell out of me. It also reminds me that I really should have Clerks and the Star Wars films on DVD. (Actually, for reasons that escape me at the moment, I do have a copy of Episode I on DVD. But I mean the real Star Wars movies

So, at the moment I'm drinking Magic Hat's Odd Notion and watching Arrested Development (Keith mentioned the show yesterday and then the DVDs found their way right back into the machine. It's a strange phenomenon. Right now I'm half-watching the one where Michael sleeps with Julia Louis-Dreyfus who is pretending to be blind.) In a few hours I'll probably be smoking on the porch, fairly drunk, and listening to one of the following albums on my iPod:
Buck 65- I Dream of Love- Live and in Private (in particular the song "Pants on Fire")
Bob Dylan- Blood on the Tracks (in particular "Idiot Wind")
or
The Stones- Exile on Main Street ("I Just Want To See His Face")
or something else altogether. Maybe Atmosphere, maybe Pavement, maybe Will Oldham.
Who knows?

I was curious about what songs I've listened to on my iPod the most. So I checked. Keep in mind, in order for the song to count, according to iPod rules, one has to hear the end of the song. So if I always skip over a few seconds of silence at the end of the song, it doesn't register. Anyway, here's the list. I was going to just do the first 25, but I found the list so fascinating I kept going. Plus I've been drinking and I get more OCD when my mind is altered. But I don't blame you if you aren't similarly fascinated by my iPod listening habits, so you can quit reading now if you like.

1. Bob Dylan- High Water (off of Love & Theft)
2. Love- A House is Not a Motel (Forever Changes)
3. Elvis Costello- Beyond Belief (Imperial Bedroom)
4. Green Day- Holiday (American Idiot) (I'm surprised too.)
5. Bob Dylan- Abandoned Love (Biograph Box Set)
6. Bob Dylan- Like A Rolling Stone (Highway 61 Revisited)
7. Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc. (Demon Days)
8. Love- Alone Again Or (Forever Changes) (Buck 65 likes this song)
9. the Band- Acadian Driftwood (Northern Lights, Southern Cross)
10. Bob Dylan- I Want You (Blonde on Blonde)
11. Neutral Milk Hotel- In The Aeroplane Over the Sea (ibid)
12. Rolling Stones- Tumbling Dice (Exile On Main Street)
13. Tom Waits- Jockey Full of Bourbon (Rain Dogs)
14. Buck 65- Yesterday's News (Heck)
15. Elvis Costello- Two Little Hitlers (Armed Forces)
16. Jeff Buckley- Hallelujah (Grace)
17. Aesop Rock- All in All (Def Jux Presents 3)
18. Bob Dylan- Things Have Changed (Wonder Boys soundtrack)
19. El-P- Flyentology (Cassettes Won't Listen Remix)
20. Leonard Cohen- Everybody Knows (I'm Your Man)
21. Neutral Milk Hotel- Holland, 1946 (Aeroplane Over the Sea)
22. Replacements- Alex Chilton (Pleased to Meet Me)
23. Aesop Rock- Junkyard (2K6 The Tracks)
24. Bob Dylan- You're A Big Girl (Blood On The Tracks)
25. Bob Dylan- Subterranean Homesick Blues (Bringing It All Back Home)
26. Bob Dylan- All Along The Watchtower (John Wesley Harding)
27. Buck 65- Rough House Blues (Secret House Against The World)
28. The Band- This Wheel's On Fire (Music From Big Pink)
29. Buck 65- 1957 (Situation)
30. Elvis Costello- Green Shirt (Armed Forces)
31. Elvis Costello- ...And In Every Home (Imperial Bedroom)
32. Love- The Daily Planet (Forever Changes)
33. Love- The Red Telephone (Forever Changes)
34. The Ramones- Needles & Pins (Road To Ruin)
35. Bob Dylan- Visions of Johanna (Blonde on Blonde)
36. Bob Dylan- Tangled Up In Blue (Blood On The Tracks)
37. Bob Dylan- It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bringing It All Back Home)
38. Bob Dylan- Thunder On The Mountain (Modern Times)
39. Buck 65- All There Is To Know About Love (Cretin Hip Hop 1)
40. Love- Andmoreagain (Forever Changes)
41. Slug/Aesop Rock/MF Doom- Put Your Quarter Up (Ritual of the...Revisited)
42. Neutral Milk Hotel- King of Carrot Flowers Part One (Aeroplane)
43. Neutral Milk Hotel- The Fool (Aeroplane)
44. Neutral Milk Hotel- Communist Daughter (Aeroplane)
45. Nirvana- Scentless Apprentice (In Utero)
46. The Pixies- Wave of Mutilation (Doolittle)
47. Atmosphere- Musical Chairs (You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having)
48. Bob Dylan- Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again (Blonde)
49. Bob Dylan- Idiot Wind (Blood On The Tracks)
50. Bob Dylan- Man In The Long Black Coat (Oh Mercy)
51. Bob Dylan- Senor (Tales of Yankee Power (Street Legal)
52. Bruce Springsteen- Downbound Train (Born In The USA)
53. The Coup- Everythang (Party Music)
54. David Bowie- Sound and Vision (Low)
55. El-P- Oxycontin Part 2 (Def Jux Presents 3)
56. Manic Street Preachers- A Design For Life (Everything Must Go)
57. The Minutemen- History Lesson Part 2 (Double Nickels On The Dime)
58. The Replacements- Skyway (Pleased To Meet Me)
59. Richard and Linda Thompson- When I Get to the Border (I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight)
60. Sonic Youth- Teen Age Riot (Daydream Nation)
61. Atmosphere- Say Hey There (You Can't Imagine)
62. The Band - Stage Fright (Stage Fright)
63. Bob Dylan- You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Blood on the Tracks)
64. Bob Dylan- Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts (Blood on the Tracks)
65. Bob Dylan- She Belongs To Me (Bringing It All Back Home)
66. Bob Dylan- Love Minus Zero/No Limit (Bringing It All Back Home)
67.Bob Dylan- One More Cup of Coffee (The Valley Below) (Desire)
68. Bob Dylan- Changing of the Guard (Street Legal)
69. Brother Ali- Champion (Shadows on the Sun)
70. Brother Ali- Daylight (The Undisptued Truth)
71. Brother Ali- Freedom Ain't Free (The Undisputed Truth)
72. David Bowie- Ashes To Ashes (Changesbowie)
73. David Bowie- Speed of Life (Low)
74. David Bowie- Breaking Glass (Low)
75. David Bowie- What In The World (Low)
76. David Bowie- Be My Wife (Low)
77. El-P- Tasmanian Pain Coaster (I'll Sleep When You're Dead)
78. El-P - Dear Sirs (I'll Sleep)
79. Elvis Costell0- Accidents Will Happen (Armed Forces)
80. Elvis Costello- Oliver's Army (Armed Forces)
81. Elvis Costello- Goon Squad (Armed Forces)
82. Elvis Costello- Man Out Of Time (Imperial Bedroom)
83. Gnarls Barkley- Crazy (St. Elsewhere)
84. Graham Parker- Discovering Japan (Squeezing Out Sparks)
85. Kanye West- Jesus Walks (The College Dropout)
86. Love- Old Man (Forever Changes)
87. My Bloody Valentin- When You Sleep (Loveless)
88. Neutral Milk Hotel- The King of Carrot Flowers Part 2 (Aeroplane)
89. R.E.M.- Fall On Me (Eponymous)
90. The Ramones- Danny Says- (End of the Century)
91. The Rolling Stones- Paint It Black (Aftermath)
92. The Beach Boys- God Only Knows (Pet Sounds)
93. Bob Dylan- Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window (Biograph)
94. Bob Dylan- Maggie's Farm (Bringing It All Back Home)
95. Bob Dylan- As I Went Out Morning (John Wesley Harding)
96. Bob Dylan- Summer Days (Love & Theft)
97. Bob Dylan- Lay Lady Lay (Nashville Skyline)
98. Bruce Springsteen- Candy's Room (Darkness On The Edge of Town)
99. Buck 65- Dang (Situation)
100. Buck 65- Wicked and Weird (Talking Honky Blues)
Make of that what you will. Keep in mind that I've really only listened to Love and Neutral Milk Hotel on my iPod, so the fact that I discovered their life-alteringly good albums during my Ipod years weighs in on the list. Same with David Bowie's Low album. Also, I was reading the 33 1/3 books on some of the albums that are really heavily represented here, so I was listening to the tracks a lot while I was reading about them. Frankly, I'm surprised I don't listen to more Neil Young, The Who, The Clash or The Beatles on my iPod, or maybe I just don't have one song of theirs that I've been obsessed with over the last year or two. I mean, Scentless Apprentice isn't my favorite Nirvana song, but I found that it's noise is a fantastic musical palate cleanser, so that's probably why it snuck onto the list. Also, my Bob Dylan obsession might be bordering on clinical. My point is that if you've never heard Bowie's Low album, you really haven't been living. Or maybe it's the other way around. Who knows for sure?

And if I had broken up with someone recently The Clash's "Train In Vain" would be all over the list. More than once I've drunkenly emailed the entire lyrics of that song to some poor girl who came to her senses. That or "Shoot You Down" by the Stone Roses or half a dozen Springsteen songs. I probably shouldn't mention that, but it's some of my proudest "least proud" moments, really.
I'm not sure I understand why any one's still reading. I mean, I would be, but most people aren't like me (thank the Gods...)

Titles are so 20th Century

It's been the kind of day where I wound up with the opening bit of Rod Stewart's "Maggie May" stuck in my head while I try and figure out exactly why Quentin Tarantino named his movie Reservoir Dogs. All of his other films' titles make sense, right? So why doesn't this one? It's the kind of question that eats at me for a few days until I manage to forget that I'm bothered by it for half a decade or so.

I watched the original Invasion of the Bodysnatchers last night for the first time. In retrospect, I'm slightly surprised that it took me a quarter of a century to see it. I mean, it's such an iconic film that between one of the film classes I took and the sheer number of old movies I've rented over the years, how is it that I missed this one? A mystery. At any rate, it actually is pretty good, although it's very short (80 minutes). Tomorrow night, I'm planning on re-watching Night of the Living Dead while sampling the Magic Hat Mardi Gras collection.

Pharoahe Monch is doing a free show at the Cat's Cradle on the 22nd. You can rsvp here if you want to see the show. His album last year, Desire, was one of the three best hip hop albums of the year, and I've been wanting to see his act ever since I heard the disc.

Today, I was thinking about who needs Nobel prizes. This is the list I came up with:
-Thomas Pynchon
-Cormac McCarthy
-Philip Roth
-Greg Maddux
-Chipper Jones (I think that he could share his with Maddux)
-Hugh Laurie
-Mark Knopfler
-Bob Dylan
-Salman Rushdie
-Bill James
-David Chase
-Ricky Gervais
-Whoever invented the iPod
-Shigeru Miyamoto
-Ric Flair
-Alan Moore
-Paul Westerberg
-David Thompson
-Jim Jarmusch

A Quick Clarifiaction.

I have no problem with Goose Gossage in the hall of fame. My problem is with Jim Rice getting more votes than Bert Blyleven, and Andre Dawson and Jack Morris getting more support than Tim Raines. This is because the people who vote for the Hall not understanding the basics of baseball.

This will only take a moment.

The Baseball Hall of Fame voters are fucking morons, and their decisions reek of stupidity and bullshit.

That is all.

Quick Hits

I've said it before, but dammmit- Super Mario Galaxy is amazing. I love how open-ended the game is- not in a sandbox way, but if you don't like a level, there are at least three or four other levels you can go to instead to get the stars you need to advance to new levels. That by itself solves one of my biggest problems with platform games where I tend to get stuck on one level and have no choice but to keep bashing my head against the game. If you have a Wii, you should be playing this game.

I finally listened to the free Atmosphere album, Strictly Leakage. If you like Atmosphere at all, you should grab it. It's pretty good. I'm curious if any of these tracks are going to be on the album that's supposed to come out this year. Keith posted the like once, but here it is again- http://www.rhymesayers.com/atmosphere/

The Horror

So, it all began again when James gave me a copy of Shaun of the Dead for Christmas. I began thinking too much about horror films again. More specifically, I began wondering why there aren't more great horror films being made at the moment.

Now, I know that, given the current, largely mediocre, state of mainstream filmmaking at the moment, it is ridiculous to wonder why there aren't more great films of any given genre being made. But that's not the point. Great horror films are a product of a larger anxiety in the mainstream psyche, a reaction to the national zeitgeist (with a particular emphasis on the "geist" part).

Consider the period from 1968 (Night of the Living Dead) to, say 1978 (Halloween). For my money, the true golden age of the horror film. The old motion picture codes were shattered, the first generation of film scholar auteurs rose to prominence, and the national psyche was rattled at best- Vietnam, assassinations, Nixon, Manson, Kent St., Altamont, fuel shortages and so forth. And the result? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Sisters, It's Alive, The Exorcist, Don't Look Now (granted, it's British, so it's a slight exception, but it's awesome so I'm mentioning it), Dawn of the Dead, Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Shivers, Rosemary's Baby, it's an amazing ten years for horror films.

Now, when then the collective national traumas of terrorism, Iraq, the aftermath of Katrina- the Bush administration, in short, is at such a fever pitch, shouldn't we also get a fertile period for horror film? No, instead we get the torture porn of the Saw and Hostel franchises, and remakes of most of the horror films that I love. (In fairness, I did like the first Saw film, and never saw any of the sequels, but Hostel was terrible. And not in the way horror films should be terrible, i.e. inspiring terror.)

What's frustrating about it is this. I've been thinking about why I like horror movies (if pressed, horror films would probably be my second favorite genre of films, provided we're not using genre in the way that video stores do, where genres include "Classics" and "Foreign". Comedies would probably be my favorite "genre", but we all can probably agree that the whole concept of genre can get problematic very quickly, so we should all back away slowly, perhaps while whistling.) and I decided that part of my attraction to horror films is that if the filmmakers are earnest enough, it is hard to make one that isn't enjoyable. Even a lot of horror films that might reasonably be considered bad as films qua films, are still enjoyable and effective. It's when horror films are made by filmmakers without pure motives that trouble arises. At least, that's the idea I'm at at the moment. I'm not convinced about it, but it seems fine enough for a working hypothesis.

Anyway, what this all amounts to is that the only two American horror films I've seen at a cineplex in the last two years (at least that I can remember) are Grindhouse and Snakes on a Plane. And while the former is legitimately good, and the latter is so much fun that it doesn't really matter if it's "good" by any conventional standard, both films are too self-aware of themselves to be disturbing. They were very effective exercises, but not effectively scary. )

I'm trying to think of other American horror movies I've seen in the last five years or so. The Ring only kind of counts, since it's a remake of a Japanese film (although Last House on the Left is kind of a remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring- I'm so glad I got a film minor so I know this shit) but it was much more confusing than scary. There have been a bunch of remakes I've ignored. Is there something I'm forgetting? The only other horror movie from this decade that I've seen and kind of liked was Silent Hill, which was adapted from a video game, and wasn't very good at all, but at least it was interesting to look at while I was ignoring the stupid story. I mean, The Blair Witch Project can't really be the last really good mainstream (in box office, if not in production) American horror movie I've seen, can it?

Just something I was thinking about.

"You could call it an omen/point ya where you're goin'

So, I just spent five hours downstairs, waiting to sign for a FedEx package for my mother. I spent the time reading Chuck Klosterman's book Killing Yourself to Live and listening to Radiohead's Kid A album and a collection of Pixies B-Sides. And I'm worried about what that says about the kind of person I am, or maybe I'm just worrying about worrying about that. I'm not sure. Now I'm listening to Bob Dyan's "Caribbean Wind", a song that most people, even most casual Dylan fans, have never heard of, because I couldn't get the instrumental part out of my head, and I'm not sure if that means something either.

I've always been strangely hesitant to read Klosterman. I have no idea why, except I had a strange, vague and utterly irrational fear of becoming the kind of person who reads Klosterman books and talks incessantly about their favorite Wilco record (despite the fact that I like Wilco) and firmly believes that Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted is a better record than, say, Revolver, (although, again, I really do like Slanted and Enchanted.

The next track on Biograph, at least the parts of Biograph that I have copied on my iPod because only parts of the Box Set were previously unreleased is "Up To Me", which is an outtake from either Desire or Blood On The Tracks, and a really good song, but one that I can't bear to listen to, so I switch, more or less randomly, to the Ramones song "I Just Want To Have Something To Do" (this is the song that they sing in the bedroom in Rock n Roll High School, if that helps). It's not my favorite Ramones song, but it cleanses my sonic palate in the exact way that I want, and now I'm worried that I'm semi-consciously aping Klosterman's style, or at least that I think I am. Which is more troubling, I'm not sure, I'm just sure that I am troubled by it, which is troubling in and of itself.

The lesson here is that I can disappear into Mobius strips in my head way too easily. Especially when I'm reading rock critics.

Maybe my brain is punishing me for spending nearly 24 hours (non-consecutively) playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii and listening to podcasts about old video games.

After the Ramones song, I think about switching to the new Atmosphere collection that I downloaded the other day and haven't gotten around to yet, or listening to In Rainbows again. I know that I don't want to listen to one of the albums that I've really fallen into in the last fifteen months or so, which rules out Daydream Nation and Pleased To Meet Me and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and The Undisputed Truth and American Idiot and Low so I wind up putting on the most recent Springsteen album, mainly to hear "Radio Nowhere" and the title cut.

The stacks of CDs on my desk (which I never use anymore, since I have a laptop but not a chair) are pretty much openly mocking me now. I reorganized the hip hop section of my cds right before Christmas, which solved one problem, but because I had to take the down the shelf of random Reggae/Soul/Funk/Dire Straits/Velvet Underground/bunch of other stuff cds to make room for the weird assortment of new albums and things I picked up at all of the shows from the last six or seven months, but you'd assume that the size of the stack on my desk would remain the same- just differently composed. But that's not the case.

After hearing the Springsteen songs I wanted to hear, I change to a song by The Band called "Acadian Driftwood" that is heart-breakingly perfect, but because it was on a mediocre album called Northern Lights-Southern Cross most people haven't heard of. It makes "The Weight", which seems to be the most enduring song of the Band's on the radio, seem like an amateur effort in comparison. Levon Helm pretty much exists to do things so beautiful that you want to cry, but even so, this song is breathtaking. The picture is of The Band. At one point, Eric Clapton wanted to be in the band. But Robbie Robertson will always be secretly better than Clapton. I consider this to be almost gnostic wisdom. And that's slightly troubling.

Reading the part of the book where Klosterman visits the site where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil makes me think about the sheer number of words I've read about the significance of Bob Dylan choosing Highway 61 to revisit in a song and album title. And I marvel at the sheer weight of the bullshit that's piled on top of some music, and how I'm just as guilty of this as everyone else. Maybe Dylan wasn't really thinking about the musical traditions associated with that particular road. Maybe he just needed a street that rhymed with "God told Abraham, Kill me a son". It's really not that inconceivable. So I decided to stop thinking about music for a while and to just half watch a rerun of Malcolm In the Middle. I really need a proper job to take my mind off of, well, all the things I think about.

After Some Thought

I just watched Ratatouille again, and I really think that it is the finest film I saw in 2007. Better than Breach, Grindhouse, Knocked Up, Superbad, American Gangster or The Simpsons Movie. While there are several highly touted films I haven't seen yet, for the moment Ratatouille is my pick for the movie from last year that represented everything worthwhile about the cinema. Pixar is simply operating on a different level than everyone else.

At the moment the only book from last year (last year meaning two hours ago) that I really have a clear memory of is Harry Potter, which was good enough, but not great, so I guess I don't really have a pick for the best book from last year. So we'll just declare Moneyball to be the winner, "publishing date" be damned.

And Super Mario Galaxy is the best thing to happen to video games in a long time. It got me so re-excited about the Wii that I actually picked up a couple of other games for the system (Zack and Wiki, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga) and haven't touched my PS2 since before Christmas. I still want an X-Box 360 (Mainly for Portal and Bioshock) but Nintendo has restored my faith in the Wii, especially if we do get Super Smash Bros. in the next two or three months.

Happy New Year everyone, if you go in for that sort of thing. If we're lucky 2008 will mean that things get better.

Oh, and I still think foreign spam in the comments is cool. It'll probably take three or four times before I get annoyed at it.