Quick Notes Towards A Greater Understanding of the Underlying Philosophy of "Greatest Movie Character Lists"

On a message board, I saw a post mentioning that "Empire Magazine" had put together a list of the hundred greatest movie characters of all time.  I scanned the list, and it was as laughable as one might expect- Indiana Jones at number one, Heath Ledger's Joker at two, Forrest Gump in the top ten while Travis Bickle languished at 27.  Obviously, this is one of those deals that is too ridiculous to take seriously.  But it got me to thinking about the metaphysics of such a list- how if you get to really thinking seriously about this inane endeavour, it might drive you crazy.  

First of all, we have to throw out the central question- what does "greatest" even mean?- it's way too objective to approach here.  It's some kind of a combination of most complex, most memorable, best written and best performed, but we'll leave it at that.  No, instead we have to begin with the question of what is a film character.  Sure, it seems self-evident.  It's a character in a film.  But what about characters who did not originate on the screen?

If you had a poll on the greatest fictional character of all time, from any medium, you'd likely find a consensus pointing to Hamlet.  In fact, if you made a top ten list, it's likely that Shakespeare would take up a lot of that real estate.  Sure, Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, Don Quixote and Captain Ahab all might sneak in, but you'd expect to see Lear and Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth and Rosalind and Falstaff and Iago monopolizing the list.  So, wouldn't it follow that since all of these characters have been portrayed in films (although off the top of my head, I can't remember an As You Like It movie), that these same characters should dominate a similar list of film characters?  I'd be surprised if they did, because no one thinks of them as film characters.  So, does that mean that these lists have an unwritten rule about characters from plays and novels?  No, because I'd be surprised if any list was missing James Bond or Don Corleone or Hannibal Lecter, all of whom were in novels before movies.  So how does this bit of cognitive dissonance work?   I suppose it comes down to how memorable the character was in the book versus the film- when you bring up James Bond, everyone thinks of Sean Connery, but if you mention Jay Gatsby, who thinks of Robert Redford?  This is an imperfect answer, but it seems like the best that thirty minutes of distracted meditation can produce.

There's also the question of "real people".  Nixon, for example, is an incredibly interesting person, and the Stone picture about him was pretty good.  But I'd be surprised if he made such a list.  But if, say, T.E. Lawrence or Jake LaMotta made the list, I wouldn't be surprised, and not just because those two examples I chose are among the most memorable performances in the history of the cinema.  Again, I think it comes down to how people think about these people.  If you mentiond Lawrence, I can imagine what Peter O'Toole looked like in the movie, but I probably couldn't pick the real Lawrence out of a lineup.  So even though Muhammad  Ali is arguably a greater "real" "character" than LaMotta, and Will Smith was pretty good in the movie, I believe people consider LaMotta to be a film character in a way that they can't with Ali, even if this is a slightly bullshit comparison because of just how goddamned great DeNiro is in Raging Bull.  But I think you might see my point.

For the record, my top five list would probably include some combination of:

Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane)

Rick Blaine (Casablanca)

Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)

Ethan Edwards (The Searchers)

and, I don't know, John Huston in Chinatown.  I can't remember the name of his character.

You No Longer Have Any Excuses

If you haven't seen Night of the Hunter, it has been added to the website Hulu.com, where you can watch it for free on your computer.  This movie is one of the true weird masterpieces of American cinema, featuring Robert Mitchum giving one of the most memorable performances ever captured on film.  A few years ago, I wrote a twenty page paper about the movie for a horror film class.  We were only asked for 8-10 pages.  That should tell you how strongly I feel about this film.  

This Month's eMusic Downloads (July)

George Carlin- Jammin' In New York

George Carlin- Carlin On Campus

Liz Phair- The three new bonus tracks for Exile In Guyville

The Decembrists- The Tain EP

The Pharcyde (who I'll see next week at Rock the Bells)- Labcabincalifornia

The Pixies- Come On Pilgrim (I'm closing in on a complete Pixies collection)

Super Furry Animals- Phantom Power

MF Doom/MF Grimm- Special Herbs +Special  Spices Volume 1

Kidz In The Hall (also at Rock the Bells)- The In Crowd

Blueprint w/ Aesop Rock- "Encounter

The Instruments (An Elephant 6 spin-off)- Dark Smaland

I saw the new Batman movie.  It was fine, although two and a half hours was way too long.  Heath Ledger was pretty damn good as Joker, and I think Gary Oldman is absolutely perfect as Jim Gordon.  But the funniest thing was the trailer for Watchmen.  Now, the idea of a Watchmen movie is as fundamentally flawed as trying to do a Citizen Kane novel, and I won't go to see it, but that wasn't what was funny.  What was funny was that the song playing during the trailer was The Smashing Pumpkins song "The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning", which was from the soundtrack for the George Clooney Batman movie.  The notion that Warner Bros. is reusing songs for their comic book movies appeals to me on some twisted level.  I'm hoping that the next Superman movie features the U2 song from the Val Kilmer Batman movie. It was the third movie I've seen this summer based on a comic book, and that's probably enough for a while.  But I am curious what Christopher Nolan will do in a third Batman movie.  I'm hoping we get to see his take on The Riddler.  No idea why, but I think that would be interesting.  The only problem is then we'd probably have a third Batman movie with Two-Face and Riddler as the villains, and that represented the beginning of the end for the franchise the last time around. 

 

Elderly Wasteland

I'm in the midst of a big documentary kick through the Netflix.  I can't quite identify the moment it began, but I realized the way that things would be after watching Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line the other night.  How I got a minor in film studies without being forced to watch this amazing film is beyond be.  Right now, I've watching Errol Morris First Person series of interviews.   Well, that and parts of the Who tribute show on VH1 Classic.  Pearl Jam is doing their version of "Love Reign O'Er Me", which is fantastic, but I was kind of hoping that they would do a Who song I had never heard them do before.  Their drummer (he used to be in Soundgarden, and for the life of me I can't remember his name at the moment- I almost called him Jack Irons) is no Keith Moon.  Then again, who is?  Now Pearl Jam is doing "The Real Me", which is also off of the Quadrophenia album.  I'd be willing to be that Eddie Vedder knows every word to Quad.  God, if they played "Punk and the Godfather" I'd be so happy.  Either Mike or Stone Gossard threw his guitar into the air and let it hit the stage to end the set, I couldn't tell which from the shot.  Neat little touch.  Now, half of the Who are playing "Baba O'Riley".  I missed the Flaming Lips playing, which I had meant to watch.  

  Until the last season of The Wire comes out on DVD in August, I have a feeling that documentaries are going to be most of my Netflix rentals.  

I'm still looking for the next book I'll fall in love with.  Last week I was so wrapped up in my sister's wedding that I fell out of whatever reading pattern I was in, and now I'm having a problem getting back into the groove.  I should probably go ahead and read the book about Big Star that's been sitting on my shelf of music books for about 15 months now.  That seems like a good way to slip back into practice, now that I think about it.

The Rock the Bells show is sneaking up on me, and I haven't done as much background listening as I had hoped to.  I'll probably pick up Nas' new album tomorrow, since his set will probably be pretty heavy with new stuff.  Nas has always been more talented than likable.  

The Greatest Thing Since the Last Thing That Was Great

When I was in middle school, I watched a potentially distressing amount of MTV.  This was around the time when they were playing the videos for "Soul To Squeeze" and "November Rain" constantly.  And every hour, they would run the "MTV News" bit where Kurt Loder had to tell all of the kids about the big news story of the day.  And of course, I was never watching when, say, he reported on Kurt Cobain killing himself (I heard about that on NPR during a car ride to a chess tournament in Charlotte, just to give you an idea of how cool I really was).  The only story I remember was one about some kid who got kicked out of a mall for wearing a t-shirt for the band Fishbone that had the phrase "Fuck Racism" on the back.  I have no idea why I remember that, since I'm not sure I've ever actually listened to a Fishbone song.  Anyway, it turns out that VH1 Classic has their own version of this- a two or three minute "news" segment that runs at the end of every hour.  Only, instead of telling semi-real news stories about "classic" bands, the segments are invariably commercials for new albums from heavy metal bands.  Kiss, in particular, for reasons I can't begin to discern.  So, after tonight's Venture Bros.  was over, I was flipping through the channels, and on my cable system, VH1 Classic is two channels away from the Cartoon Network.  So I caught the most awesome segment with Judas Priest talking about their latest album.  It's a concept album about  Nostradamus- a double album actually- and watching three aging guys wearing their heavy metal leather outfits and talking so seriously about Nostradamus turns out to be more Spinal Tap than some scenes from the film This Is Spinal Tap.  To give you some idea of how awesome this is, I quote from the "Story line" section of the album's Wikipedia page.  "Nostradamus [no italics is sic] centres [also sic, leading me to believe that the British contingent of Judas Priest fans won out on a wiki editing war that was truly a thing of beauty] around the life and times of the prophet.  The first disc details various prophecies he has about the future and the end of the world.  This leads to him being exiled.  Later on, after his death, the world realises [also sic] just how right he was."  The album is out now, and there's a version that includes a 48 page booklet.  The mind can only boggle at the potential brilliance of that.  I just looked at the track listing, and the last track is called "Future of Mankind" and is eight and a half minutes long.  Just when you think that you've seen all that the world has to offer, something like this returns to restore your since of... wonder, I guess?  

My sister's wedding seemed to go well.  I won't bother describing it, since there's a very real chance that only two people reading this blog weren't there in person.  And today I got the cathartic thrill of deleting about a dozen songs that my sister insisted I download onto my computer.

I think I had gotten used to being fairly busy over the last few days, because I couldn't really relax today.  So I went to see Hellboy 2, in part because I thought the first one was pretty decent, but mostly because I wanted to go the movies and that was the only thing I hadn't seen that I have any intention of ever seeing.  The movie is very interesting visually, but mostly sucks as a story.  del Toro, the director, seems to believe that audience has some sort of emotional connection to these characters, which is a very odd thing to believe.  If I hadn't already divested myself of any expectations for the Hobbit movies (yes, movieS.  Peter Jackson could do each book from Lord of the Rings in one film, but Guillermo del Toro needs two movies to tell the story of Bilbo Baggins stumbling across a piece of jewelry, walking around with a bunch of dwarves, then arguing with a dragon, then going back home), I would probably be concerned.  

I picked up the new Beck album.  I've only listened to it once, while I was driving around on Saturday.  The album seemed fine, but it didn't jump out at me as much I was hoping for, especially since Danger Mouse produced it.  Beck is one those acts that I like, but I would have a hard time explaining precisely why.  I mean, I love Odelay as much as the next guy, and maybe this idea I have that Beck is looked at as some sort of standard-bearer for music fans between the ages of, say, 25-40 is just my own misconception, but... actually, I'm not sure where I'm going with this.  You figure it out.  

I also bought the new Weezer album, even though I had agreed with myself that I wasn't going to.  Which goes to show how much I can be trusted.  I listened to the first three songs on the way to the movies.  The first track was kind of just there, the second track was a mess, and the third was the single "Pork and Beans", which seems all of the obvious "singles" from the post-Pinkerton albums- "Hash Pipe", "Keep Fishing", "Beverly Hills" and so forth.  I'll listen to the rest of the album with the hope that it can only exceed my low expectations.  I form odd sense of cultural obligation.  I've bought all of Weezer's releases this decade (including an import version of the Green album, the import of the "Island In The Sun" single and the limited release EP of the band live in Japan) out of a sense of obligation.  But I was once as big a Kevin Smith fan as I was a Weezer fan, and I haven't seen one of his movies in the theater since 2001.  

All The Bathorses and all the Batmen

I saw some "news" story about the mad rush for tickets for the upcoming Batman movie, and I got to thinking.  Specifically, I began to think about just how many Batman movies have come to theaters since the first Tim Burton film.  Do you realize that this will be the seventh Batman movie since 1989?  The list goes: Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight,  and the somewhat forgotten animated film Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm.  I tried to think of other franchises that have been this prolific over the same time period, and I could only come up with two: James Bond, which will have had seven films since 1989 when Quantum of Solace opens later this year (License to Kill, Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace) and Star Wars, if you count the 1997 theatrical re-releases of the original trilogy, plus the new trilogy and the up-coming animated Clone Wars.  There have been five Harry Potter movies (and three or four to come, since they are splitting up the sixth book, and one would assume that they might do the same with Deathly Hallows.  And apparently, Saw V is going to come out this year, even though I have a hard time imagining who is clamoring for this.  (I just googled "movie franchises", and I realized I had completely forgotten about the Star Trek movies, of which there have been six installments since 1989.  Since I just watched the documentary Trekkies last night, I probably should have thought of that).  

Just something that occurred to me.

Don't even ask me about how my day went.  Suffice to say that trying to hook a laptop up to an ancient amplifier is a bitch.  After visiting a Best Buy, a Circuit City and a Target, I think I finally have daisy-chained enough adapters and cables together to actually get music to flow through the speakers for my sister's wedding reception, but I'm taking nothing on faith at this point.  I'd worry about the fidelity of the sound, but given some of the songs my sister has demanded, it might be a hidden blessing if people can only half-hear David Cook, "The Electric Slide", "The Cha-Cha Slide" (which is a more inane version of the electric slide.  I know, I didn't think it was possible either) and Edwin McCain (Do you like Hootie and the Blowfish?  Then you'll love their inbred cousin!  At least, that's how I remember him from the two weeks in 1995 when people gave a shit about Edwin McCain).  

(To be fair, she is letting me choose about 85 or 90 percent of the music, so it's kind of mean for me to keep mocking her taste.  On the other hand, I can't help it, because I'm the kind of person who thinks that High Fidelity hits a little close to home.)  

Where I'm Calling From and Where I've Been

If I were a mixtape, it would sound something like this at the moment.

1. Nirvana- Aneurysm (Live version from a bootleg I have where the guys who printed up the liner notes thought that the title was "Come On Over") (key line: " Love you so much it makes me sick")

2. Aesop Rock- Commencement at the Obedience Academy "Must not sleep/must warn others")

3. Neutral Milk Hotel- Communist Daughter ("Bends toward herself the soothing")

4. Talking Heads- Take Me to The River ("Love is an ocean that I can't forget")

5.  Neil Young- Tonight's The Night ("As real as the day is long")

6.  Robert Johnson- Come On In My Kitchen ("Babe it going to be raining outdoors")

7. The Refreshments- Interstate ("I don't need a miracle but I could use a push in the right direction")

8. Soundgarden- Outshined ("I got up feeling so down")

9.  Mission of Burma- That's When I Reach For My Revolver ("But all of that is changed now")

10. Love- A House Is Not A Motel ("And if someone asks you/you can call my name")

11.  The Beach Boys- I Just Wasn't Made For These Times ("They say I got brains but they ain't do me no good")

12.  The Jam- That's Entertainment ("Waking up from bad dreams and smoking cigarettes")

13.  Graham Parker- I Discovered America ("Everyone said quit now and that's when I found hope")

14. The Flaming Lips- Waitin' For A Superman ("Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be")

15. Eliot Smith- Speed Trials ("But it's sure as fate and hard as your luck")

16. MF Grimm- Children Of Cain ("Children of Cain just nod to this")

17. Bruce Springsteen- Magic ("This is what will be")

18. Atmosphere- Tears For The Sheep ("The language was primitive, the listener complex")

19. The Replacements- Swingin' Party ("If bein' afraid is a crime we'll hang side by side")

20. Canibal Ox- The F-Word ("I'm more than just a shoulder to cry on")

Sometimes I'm pretty sure that most people don't go about things in the ways that I do. 

What I've been up to:

 

Reading: Dennis Lehane's Darkness Take My Hand and Sacred, The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns (it's kind of a precursor to The Wire. Actually, I picked up the Lehane books in large part because he wrote for The Wire.)  Slam by Nick Hornby, which was good but not great, and intended more for teenage readers than his other books (although it might have enough cursing to irritate some high school librarians, which I consider to be a point in its favor), I just started Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses,  and we'll see if I finish it, as it looks like a fairly demanding read.  Also, there's a slight chance that Islamists might go after me for reading it.  

Listening:  Besides the stuff I mentioned, I've been getting prepared for the Rock The Bells festival later this month by listening to some of the acts on the bill that I'm less familiar with, like The Pharcyde and Immortal Technique.  Beyond that, a lot of the usual suspects.  Plus I'm still working on the music for my sister's wedding reception, which is alternately fun and maddening.  Guests who know me will be able to tell which songs I chose, and which songs the increasingly deranged bride chose.  Also, do you really think Elvis Costello's "Allison" is appropriate for a wedding reception?  I get that my sister's future husband's sister is named Allison, but I can't be the only person who actually understands what the song about, can I?  I mean, why don't we just play all of Dylan's Blood On The Tracks while we're at it.  (Except for "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", which could potentially work.  And on some tv show, there was a wedding where the theme song was "Shelter From The Storm", but I think they only heard the parts about "I came in from the wilderness/a creature void of form/ 'Come in' she said I'll give you/shelter from the storm" and missed the entire rest of the song, which mostly consists of lost loved and Dylan comparing himself to Jesus, which is practically an entire sub-genre of Dylan songs.  But the show got it wrong by using the album version.  I would have used the live version from the Hard Rain album.  But that's just me)

Watching: Wall-E, which I liked, the second season of My Name Is Earl, which I started on Netflix after finishing the fourth season of The Wire.  I think Rome will be next.  I saw the new Narnia movie, which was okay but way too long, and The Happening,  (going to see it wasn't my decision, which I hope I don't even have to say.  As is often the case when I see a bad movie, there was a girl involved.  The only bad movie which I saw in the theaters by choice over the last few years was The Da Vinci Code, which I had to see after it got booed at Cannes.  I was hoping for a true train wreck, but Ron Howard could only produce a mediocre mess.)which isn't so much bad as inscrutable.  It's like a film made by aliens who had seen a few Earth movies, but really didn't understand them.  But it's also pretty bad.  I think I was the only person in the theater who wasn't so much pissed off as impressed by it's essential strangeness (strangeness in the bad way, not the awesome Night of the Hunter or David Lynch way).  I saw Indiana Jones, mostly out of a sense of cultural obligation.  It wasn't really bad, but it was staggeringly unnecessary, and the actors seemed to know this.  I finally caught up with Battlestar Galactica, which I had begun avoiding this season.  The final few episodes of the half-season were pretty decent, so I'll wind up finishing the ride when the show re-starts.  Oh, and The Venture Bros., which is still six kinds of awesome.  And my secret shame is watching Hell's Kitchen on Hulu.com.  I hate the reality show parts of the show (i.e. all of the contestants display sociopathic tendencies, pointlessly dramatic commercial breaks, inane contests) but I'm a sucker for Gordon Ramsay yelling at people.  I wonder if BBC America shows episodes of the British version of the show, which I'm positive is better than the Americanized version.  And if next season is b-list celebrities, then even Ramsay can't keep me there.

Playing: No one game in particular.  Some GTA: San Andreas, some re-playing of the original Half-Life on PS2, some Super Mario Galaxy, some Bully.  But there's no game that I'm obsessed with at the moment.  I picked up Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii, mostly because of how much I love the Lego Star Wars games.  It's pretty good, but by no means is it a must-buy, especially since it doesn't take very long to finish.   

The picture is Neil Young, but you already should have known that.  

Oh, and by the time I finished editing and rewriting this, I looked up and it was Thursday. I am apparently 26 now, which is slightly vexing.  I thought that 25 was a perfectly reasonable age to be.  

Don't Quote Me Boy, Cause I Ain't Said Shit

Sorry about the lack of activity lately. My computer has been acting up, and apparently needs a new hard drive to be content.

What I've been up to:
Reading- books about Shakespeare, specifically Stephen Greenblat's "Will In The World" and Peter Ackroyd's "Shakespeare: The Biography". I need to finish the book "Mansion on the Hill", which is about the corporate incursion into rock music. I got distracted by the Shakespeare books and need to pick this one back up.
Watching- The Wire on DVD, the season finales of 3o Rock, Lost (My bold prediction is that Locke is in the coffin. I'd almost be willing to bet on it) and The Office (fantastic season finale- so much to love about it, but I'd single out another sighting of the great Mose Schrute and Dwight convincing the new HR woman that Kevin is retarded), the movies "Iron Man" (good not great) and "Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" (way too long, and there was no need to invent scenes that aren't in the books to pad out the running time past the 2 hour mark) and "Clueless" in chunks on TBS. That movie is so much better than it should be.
Listening- A lot of The Pogues and Shane McGowan, the Mobb Deep song "Shook Ones Part II", which is an old song that I've been captivated by lately, the new Gnarls Barkley and Atmosphere albums, Cool Calm Pete's album "Lost", and while I was doing some editing work I couldn't stop listening to Oasis collections (specifically the greatest hits compilation "Stop the Clocks" and the B-Sides collection "The Masterplan". I really can't explain why the brothers Gallagher seemed so conducive to fixing typos.
Playing- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Bully, No More Heroes, which I picked up when I saw a used copy on sale for about 25 bucks and my curiosity about what a punk video game would really be like got the best of me, WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (although I'm still waiting for a pro wrestling video game as good as the ones for the N64 were), the download game Lostwinds on the Wii, which is really fantastic, albeit way too short.

Hopefully my computer will be fine on Tuesday, so I can resume semi-regular entries.

Buddy Holly, Thom Yorke and P.T. Anderson: The Axis of...Something

Easing back into things with a question. Do you know the Radiohead song "True Love Waits"? It's an acoustic track at the end of the "I Might Be Wrong" live album. It's a fantastic song, stunning in it's simplicity when compared to the songs from "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" on the rest of the album. But what I've always wondered is this: Is the title a deliberate echo of the Buddy Holly song "True Love Ways"? This is the band that gave us a B-side titled "Paperbag Writer". So, maybe, right?

Now, on the Radiohead EP/single entitled "My Iron Lung', there is a song called "Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong". A few years after the release of the EP/single, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed a film called "Punch Drunk Love", which wasn't as good as the two movies that preceded it. Did P.T. Anderson lift his title from the Radiohead song? Remember, for the soundtrack of his next film, There Will Be Blood, Anderson employed one Jonny Greenwood, lead guitarist of Radiohead, to score the film.

Ricky Gervais' favorite song by Radiohead is "Bones", or at least that's what he told the BBC. My favorite Radiohead song is either "Lucky" or "Black Star" or "Knives Out" or, occasionally, "Idioteque".

I have seen more movies since the last time we spoke. One was titled "Walk Hard", and was funny and flawed and had some really good music and a great cameo by Eddie Vedder, and I would recommend to some people, but with the warning not to expect too much. The next movie was called "Into The Wild", and Eddie Vedder was also part of that movie (he did the soundtrack). "Into The Wild" is a good movie, but not a great movie, in part because Sean Penn is a better actor than he is a director, and he tries to get too cute with editing and flashing text on the screen, but if you've seen all of the really great movies from last year and want to see a good movie from last year, you should maybe see "Into The Wild". The third movie was "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead', which was directed by Sidney Lumet five decades after his first movie, "12 Angry Men" and for that fact alone is rather astonishing. It's a movie about two brothers who decide to rob their parents jewelry store. It doesn't go well for them from there. It has Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke and Marissa Tomei and Albert Finney in it, and it got ignored by the Oscars, but I liked the movie a lot. It's not as great as "There Will Be Blood' or "No Country For Old Men" or even "Juno", but it's good.

My sister is getting married, and I'm in charge of the music. Today, I got a list of songs that they want played at the reception. I saw that "The Twist" was on the list, which surprised me. I asked my sister's fiancee about it, and he referred to it as the song from "Wedding Crashers". I watched "Wedding Crashers" once, but outside of it reminding me an awful lot of "Meet the Parents" with Vince Vaughn as Ben Stiller and Christopher Walken as Robert DeNiro, and being disappointingly mediocre, the movie didn't make much of an impression on me. So I went to imdb, to check what songs were used in "Wedding Crashers" and there I discovered that they didn't want Chubby Checkers' "The Twist" at all. No, they want "Shout" by the Isley Brothers. My best guess is that because of the song "Twist and Shout", they got the two songs mixed up. This is what I'm working with.

It doesn't matter which you heard the holy or the broken hallellujah.

There's a Leonard Cohen line, in "First We Take Manhattan", that goes something like, "You loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win.". I really like that line. I've had a few things I meant to write about this past week, but my mind has mostly been consumed by one big thing that has yet to fully resolve itself. More on that maybe. Or not. There are probably more Leonard Cohen lines that apply here.

What I downloaded from eMusic this month:
-Alex Chilton- "In The Street" (Live version)
-CunninLynguists (It's possible that I didn't misspell that in the correct incorrect way)- Dirty Acres
-Del The Funky Homosapien- Eleventh Hour
-Dinosaur Jr.- Beyond
-Fugazi - 13 Songs
-Mike Ladd- Nostalgialator
-Minor Threat- Out Of Step
-Mission of Burma- Signals, Calls & Marches
-RJD2- "Rollerskating Jam"
-Two tracks of Ursus Minor w/ Brother Ali
-Wilco- "I Must Be High" (Live)
-Matthew Sweet's cover of Big Star's "The Ballad of El Goodo"
-Paul Westerberg- "As Far As I Know"

Keith- I'm listening to "Suzanne" right now. The bit about tea and oranges that come all the way from China is in the first verse.

The post-punk 80s rock I downloaded mainly because I've started reading the book Our Band Could Be Your Life which covers those bands. The Mike Ladd thing I've never really heard of, but I'll grab anything that Def Jux releases. Alex Chilton, of course, was in Big Star, and there should be statues of him in at least three major American cities. One is Memphis, and I don't care where the other two are.

The picture is of Pushkin, because I like Pushkin.

I finally watched The Darjeeling Limited today, in between basketball games. The DVD sat in the Netflix sleeve on my desk for nearly a week before I got around to it. The movie was fine, I guess. I liked it more than the Life Aquatic, but it kind of felt like Anderson was returning to fields he already plowed with Tanenbaums, which I liked a lot more than Darjeeling. Kids, this is why it might be a mistake to begin your career with three films, two of which are nearly perfect and the other a legitimate masterpiece- you'll have a hard time staying on that plateau.

Monday night is the Brother Ali show at the Cradle. I've seen Ali twice before, and both times were special. I expect nothing less for this show. I'll probably scribble down a bunch of words about it, in no small part because at times I think Ali just might be one of the two or three best rappers of the decade.

NCAA Tournament stuff: Thursday was boring, Friday was awesome. The Tampa pod, where two twelve seeds and two thirteen seeds won in the first round is my favorite thing in sports since State beat UNC in football last year. Duke losing to Bob Huggins and West Virginia was just pure gravy. The only way this could get better would have been if Texas A&M could have held on against UCLA, or if Arkansas can somehow knock off UNC tomorrow. Which I can't envision happening. I'm really glad that I didn't fill out a bracket for a serious pool this year- I had Pitt in the Final Four. The only upsets I had were Davidson over Gonzaga and Siena over Vandy. I also might have predicted Duke to go to the Final Four, which in retrospect was a silly thing to believe.

Do you know the part of "Downtown Train" where Tom Waits rasps "I'm shining like a new dime"? He should have won a Pulitzer Prize for that moment. Doesn't matter what category. Hell, he should have won all of them. The Pulitzers are usually wasted, anyway.

Citation Needed

Hey yo.

So, I haven't been up to a lot in the last week or so. I've been re-reading James Elroy's novel American Tabloid, which is a lot easier to keep straight on the second run through. The book is one of those historical novels that mixes real people with fictional characters (like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Caleb Carr's The Alienist, or the Harry Potter books). The book is the first installment of a trilogy, and I read on the Wikipedia that the third book is supposed to come out this year.

I've watched a few movies- The Good Shepherd, which desperately wants to be The Godfather of spy movies, and eventually fails at that ambition. I watched Million Dollar Baby, which is very good, and I'm not sure why I didn't see back when it came out. And I watched The Age Of Innocence, which is a Scorsese film that is rated PG, which is weird at an existential level. Whenever I see a Scorsese film without excessive violence or vulgarity, I feel slightly confused, even when the movie is very good (i.e. After Hours or The Aviator or his Bob Dylan documentary). So now I have The Departed playing in the background, just to bring order back to the universe, violent-Scorsese-movie wise.

I've been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen (still) and trying to decide if he's my second or third favorite Canadian songwriter of all time (He's behind Neil Young and maybe Joni Mitchell.) I have a list of favorite Canadians, and only one person on the list is fictional. That has to be considered a compliment to the Maple Leaf State, right.

I've been meaning to write more, but keep forgetting that I'm meaning to, and then I spend time regretting when I should be using it to try and write more. It's a vicious cycle, really.

I've been thinking about how weird the internet really is. Last week, on the Deadspin sports blog, there was a link to a website called Garfield minus Garfield. I found it to be really funny, and quite possibly brilliant, so I broke my own rule about forwarding internet memes to friends of mine. Then, a few days later, a completely different website I was reading had a link to the Garfield site. And then, in the issue of Entertainment Weekly that came today (I subscribed because I like the magazine, but I really like only paying ten bucks a year for the magazine. The looming death of the printed word is something of a bummer, but you can't beat the bargains that it entails.) there was another reference to the website. There are probably already websites and/or blogs mocking the Garfield minus Garfield, or doing the same thing with other comic strips that aren't funny. The internet is really weird.

If you don't hear from me in the next few months, it'll mean either a)my enemies have caught up with me and it us up to any poor souls who accidentally click on this blog to avenge my deaths (unlikely) or b) I'm picking up a copy of the Wii game Super Smash Bros. Brawl tomorrow, and I won't be able to extricate myself from its clutches for a while. I actually went to Circuit City to pre-order the game, which is something I hadn't done since Sonic the Hedgehog 2 about 15 years ago. I pre-ordered it mainly because Circuit City said they would give me a ten dollar gift card if I paid them in advance, which struck me as a reasonable offer, and because it's entirely possible that this game will be as hard to come across as Wiis for a week or two, and I've been waiting for this game for a long time, because I'm a nerd and I get enjoyment from beating up Pokemons with Link that I would rather not examine closely.

Wiggum and Scorsese

So, tonight's Simpsons was alright. Not great, but not terrible. In other words, like most of the recent episodes (except for the 90s episode, which was terrible). But the last line was tremendous. The episode was a send-up of The Departed, and at the end they did the shot of the actual rat. Then, Ralph Wiggum popped up and said "the rat symbolizes obvious-ness." It's funny because it's true.

Quick reviews of DVDs I've watched recently:
Michael Clayton- Really good movie. George Clooney is, like, the third or fourth best actor around, and the only real movie star we have these days. This movie should have been more popular, but I think a lot of people wanted it to be a kind of John Grisham legal thriller instead of a character study.

For Your Consideration- By the same people who did Best In Show and Waiting For Guffman and A Mighty Wind. All of those movies are better than this one. Missing from For Your Consideration: the mockumentary format and characters anyone cares about at all. the latter was more important to the other Christopher Guest films than the former. Fred Willard tries to save the film, but even he can't.

The Extras Holiday Special- Ricky Gervais is also in For Your Consideration, but he's better when he's back in the role of Andy. The (presumably) last episode of Extras is funny (although the celebrity cameos aren't as funny as Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan's roles were) but is intentionally pretty dark. When Ricky Gervais was David Brent on the Office, he regularly said things that made the audience uncomfortable, but when he does it as Andy, it is harder to know how to feel because he spent a dozen episodes making us like Andy. I wonder if the message about celebrities would be more resonant with the masses if Ricky Gervais was a bigger celebrity in the US? Which would be weird. Or I'm thinking about this poorly, maybe. On the commentary track of For Your Consideration (I listened to it hoping that Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy would explain why they made so many bad decisions. They did not explain.) Guest and Levy said that Gervais was nervous about appearing in the movie. Not because he could sense it was a train wreck, but because he didn't do improv or ad-libbing on The Office or Extras. And this blew my fucking mind. The notion that Merchant and Gervais wrote out every line of their shows is really stunning.

My goal had been to see Be Kind Rewind this weekend, but it's not playing in Apex or Cary. This is annoying. I don't really want to drive to the Raleigh Grand or Southpoint in Durham to see this movie. What's really vexing is that it's not playing at the art house theaters or the mulitplexes. It's as if Gondry's film is too big for the little guys but not big enough to wrest a screen away from the Bucket List or the latest terrible film about step-dancing that uses numbers instead of words in the title (I guess Prince also follows this unfortunate habit, but he's a genius, so I let it slide with him). The bigger problem for me is this: I don't really trust critics when it comes to Gondry. I just looked up what The Science of Sleep got on metacritic. You know what that beautiful little masterpiece's aggregate is? Fuckin' 7o! So while the reviews for Be Kind, Rewind have been mostly mediocre-to-good, as far as I can tell, I'm not sure if I should take this as meaning not to drive out of my way to see it or not. If you can see my meaning through poorly chosen words.

Fuck it. I'm going to bed.

Let The Beatles Be.

Okay. I wrote this in bits and pieces while I was watching the movie, so it might be a touch disjointed. But since there are only two or three people reading this (wow, I wish that was self-deprecating humor instead of a simple fact) I decided to just more or less leave it haphazardly constructed as it is.

So. I'm watching the movie Across The Universe. And here's the thing. They put the character named "Prudence" into a closet for no reason that makes sense from the plot thus far, but so the other characters could sing "Dear Prudence". I can only wait for when the character named "Sadie" does something so the other characters can ask her what she has done. Oh, and Martin Luther from The Roots is playing a character that comes as close as possible to being Hendrix. And he is good. And Bono plays a Timothy Leary type named "Dr. Robert" who sings "I am the Walrus". Which is weird, but not in the way that it was meant to be. Oh, and Eddie Izzard does a spoken word kind of thing from "For The Benefit of Mr. Kite" that's really very awesome. Because Eddie Izzard is awesome, and takes the Beatles song merely as a point of departure, instead of slavishly sticking to the material, He has the balls to riff on the lyrics, (rather than just changing the tempo or the arrangement) and that is fantastic. Honestly, the main reason I went ahead and moved the movie to the top of my Netflix queue. was to see the Eddie Izzard performance. that, and Michael Clayton is horribly backlogged. The only other performer I recognized was Evan Rachel Wood, who is from Raleigh and might or might not be dating Marilyn Manson. I read something about it in the paper once, but I don't care enough to invest any more time in finding out if they are still together, assuming they ever were.

The movie is a mess, not unlike Idlewild and Moulin Rouge, which are the two films this one most reminds me of. (Oh, and Pennies From Heaven, which I always think is a sort of unrecognized precursor to Moulin Rouge, and contains one of my favorite Steve Martin performances, but no one seems to remember. That movie is awesome). The concept is lifted from the Broadway shows that formed narratives built around the songs of Billy Joel (successfully) and Bob Dylan (unsuccessfully, but it's more troubling is to try and contemplate the kind of mind that sees a coherent narrative in Dylan lyrics. This is the kind of brain that sees connections between FEMA and the Freemasons.) The Beatles have more songs that resonate with more people than either Dylan (a lot of Dylan's most popular songs are not his best songs) or Joel (who is probably underrated by the musical intelligentsia), but the whole thing feels like a gimmick through a lot of the film. And actors performing Beatles songs is not more interesting than the actual Beatles songs. For a Beatles nerd like me, the movie quickly became a kind of guessing game of what song would come next. (I never would have guessed that "Oh Darling" would make an appearance.) It also occurs to me that if one wanted to make a movie built around Beatles songs, it really ought to be better than than the movies the Beatles made. And it is very hard to make a movie about rock music that even compares to A Hard Day's Night.

The movie desperately wants to be about the sixties, but doesn't seem to have anything new or interesting to say about what might be the most over analyzed bit of recent history. So it really feels like it's about nothing much at all. Has there been a really good movie looking back at the 1960s as "The Sixties"? Hair was good, but not great. Forrest Gump comes to mind, but that doesn't help because I really hated Forrest Gump. There are plenty of great movies that address major parts of the sixties (Mississippi Burning, JFK, Full Metal Jacket, The Right Stuff are all obvious examples). But I can't think of a good film about the hippie part of the sixties. Which might prove the point that hippies are incredibly annoying. The attempts to equate the Vietnam war with the war in Iraq are obvious and heavy-handed, and have all been made before.

The movie is not terrible. But it's not particularly good either. But I can't help but thinking the larger concept of the film could be interesting if it went farther. The trick might be to divorce the era depicted from the songs chosen. Like doing a musical set in late Victorian London to Radiohead songs (is "Knives Out" too obvious for the Jack The Ripper sequence?) or Tom Waits songs in a movie about the Depression.

For the record, my three favorite pieces of art that play with the Beatles considerable iconography are the book Paperback Writer, the B-Sharps episode of the Simpsons and the Danger Mouse mash up of the Beatles with Jay-Z's Black Album. Tomorrow night is the free Brand Nubian show at the Cradle, so I'll probably write a little something about that.

(You have no idea how proud I am of that "Knives Out" idea. I'm now trying to think of what song to have Oscar Wilde sing.)

Wow

I'm almost impressed by the Oscars. No Country For Old Men was the best movie I saw from last year, and it actually managed to win. Ratatouille was the best animated film I saw (although I haven't seen Perseopolis yet) and it won. Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem gave my favorite performances by any actors I saw, and they both won. I thought Juno had the best screenplay, and it won too. There Will Be Blood was the prettiest movie I saw, and the Bourne movie had the best editing, and even they won. There's no chance I'll ever see the Edith Piaf movie, so I'll never know if the actress was actually better than Ellen Page in Juno, but on the whole, this was one of the best list of Oscars I've ever seen. I almost wish I had watched any part of the ceremony outside of Stewart's decent-but-not-great opening monologue. Almost.

I'm sure that this will be corrected for next year's awards, and the ceremony can get back to recognizing mediocrity.

There Will Be Something or Other

Okay. I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I did see There Will Be Blood last week. And honestly, I was a little disappointed. The movie looks fantastic, and Daniel Day-Lewis gives an incredible performance, but the movie seems a little lost, especially in the second half. I liked it better than Punch Drunk Love, but not as much as Magnolia and Boogie Nights. The Filthy Critic's review of the movie consists entirely of saying "Rosebud". I hadn't really thought of that, but he's kind of really right. The progression of Day-Lewis's character is not dissimilar from Charles Foster Kane. No Country For Old Men is still my pick for the best film of 2007, narrowly beating out Juno and King of Kong.

The picture I stole from Deadspin. Apparently, it's not photoshopped. The Chinese have decided to race lions on horses. I realize that this explanation raises way more questions than it answers. I'm not sure which animal one should feel more sorry for. I do know that I've never seen an animal more clearly screaming the words "Oh Shit!" I'm also remembering Seth Rogen's remarks about donkey shows at the beginning of The Forty Year Old Virgin. "You think it's going to be awesome, but then you get there and it's a lion riding a horse. I felt bad for the lion. I felt bad for the horse."

I spent a lot of time this weekend making mix cds for people I haven't seen in five years or more. The movie Juno is partially to blame for this, somehow. Also to blame- my dislike of the music played on the radio, the fact that I'm significantly better at driving when I'm listening to music, Rob Sheffield's book Love Is A Mix-Tape and, in ways I can't begin to understand, the fifth season of Six Feet Under, which I was watching from the Netflix. There's a lot of Big Star on the cds I made. If the world was fair, there would be statues of Alex Chilton in at least three (3) American cities, and possibly cities named for him throughout the Mid-West.

I did not watch the Grammys last night (as you might guess). Actually, I did catch part of the Beatles tribute (which seemed to feature both the Cirque de Soleiel, which I misspelled) and the cast of Across the Universe (which I haven't seen) and I was pretty underwhelmed. I then saw Jason Bateman talking about the Foo Fighters (I wonder if their last album was any good. I don't wonder enough to actually buy the album though. There first three albums were pretty good.) I guess Kanye West and Amy Winehouse dominated the awards. (Although I don't understand how Amy Winehouse won "best new artist" for her SECOND album. I don't care if the first album wasn't released in the US. It still exists.) I like Kanye, although his last album didn't impress me (except for "Stronger" and "Can't Tell Me Nothing"). Amy Winehouse doesn't do a lot for me. I managed to avoid hearing the "Rehab" song until last month, and I don't really see why people are so interested in it. If I wanted to hear someone who sounds like Shirley Bassey, I would watch the opening credits of Goldfinger, or listen to that Propellerheads CD I'm not sure why I have. Springsteen won something for "Radio Nowhere", which is a song I really like. Barack Obama won a Grammy, which puts the score at:
Obama 1, Hendrix 0.

Make sense of that one.

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.

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...)

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.

Quick Thoughts from the throes of insomnia

Keith's wedding turned out well, on the whole. I was more nervous than he was, as far as I could tell, but I managed to not lose the rings, and I completely failed to trip on my way to and from the front of the church. I could hardly have asked for more. In the end, it was decided that there would be no toasts. I had just about figured out what I was going to say, and I think that the words I had more or less settled on would have been appropriate and even somewhat lovely, even if they weren't particularly profound.

In other news, I heard that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. This is what we in the literary field refer to as "bad news". I've spent the past few months re-reading the Discworld novels, and I've been very pleased at how well they've stood up to second readings. I think it was a critic for the Washington Post who compared Pratchett to Chaucer, and I'm consistently jealous at not having thought of that myself. Pratchett's clearly not in the same pantheon as Chaucer, and I don't believe for a second that the Discworld novels will be held in anywhere near the same esteem as the Canterbury Tales, but there is a common worldview, and although I never studied Chaucer in the same depths as I studied Shakespeare or Donne or Nabokov in school, I feel like the old master would have appreciated Pratchett's sense of humor. It's just possible that the best of Pratchett's works (Small Gods, definitely, Carpe Jugulum, perhaps) might one day be required reading that undergraduates skim through on the night before the test. We can only hope.

I'm a little annoyed that three movies that I actually really want to see are all coming out on Friday: Sweeney Todd, Charlie Wilson's War and Walk Hard all look excellent, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to seeing all three in the theater, especially since I still haven't seen "No Country For Old Men".

Thursday night Slick Rick is doing a free show at the Cradle. At the moment, Keith and I are still planning on going. Really, the Little Brother show would have been the more poetic choice for the last show of a fantastic year in live music, but the bastards who control the schedules don't agree.

The Johnny Cash picture is just one I like. I guess since Walk Hard is in part a parody of Walk The Line (which was a pretty good movie that never bothered to flirt with greatness, if you want my opinion), I suppose the picture is somehow thematically appropriate.