Listing Badly, Taking On Water
End of the year "Best of" lists are great and all, but as I sat down and started thinking about typing one, something seemed... missing. I mean, this is a blog after all. It's me being consumed with me and the raw details of myself, right?

So I thought about it some more and decided that the real blogger thing to do, the real hard-core, self-important thing to do would be not to just list what I thought the "best" stuff was but rather to record for posterity every single bit of cultural data I happened across in the course of the last twelve months.

Think of it as a whole grocery list instead of just remembering the meals I liked. So if these items are food, then they've been digested and what you're about to read--to extend the metaphor--is bodily excretia I expel when I've used them up for all they're worth. But what's a blog if not a forum for carefully examining your own feces...

...and then sharing your findings with as many people as possible.

Don't worry, I have kids. I don't get out much. The lists are going to be short.

We'll go shortest to longest.

Not everything's going to get a review, so don't panic.

Movies I saw (restricted to theaters because I can't remember all the ones I saw on cable and you don't really want a review of Erotic Confessions 6):

Troy
Spider-Man 2
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The Incredibles

And that's it. Four goddamn films. That isn't even enough to make a Best Picture category. The only one that was really disappointing was Troy: I was told I was going to be able to see Brad Pitt's dick. Ah well. I guess that's why we have the internet as a fall back position.

The Incredibles was really really good though. No nudity whatsoever.


CDs I bought:

Modest Mouse, Good News For People Who Love Bad News
The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
They Might Be Giants, The Spine
Elvis Costello, The Delivery Man
Jimmy Eat World, Futures
New Pornographers, Electric Version
Green Day, American Idiot


Woo, six! That's actually an incredible haul for one year for me. The last three I bought, like, three days ago, so it's slightly artificially inflated much like I assume Alan Greenspan is from time to time.

Modest Mouse has some great tracks past "Float On". Some of them are what reviewers will cowardly call "experimental" or "challenging" which is secret code for "noisy and tuneless", but by and large it's a highly satisfying musical experience.

TMBG I bought because I've bought every album of theirs since I was 12, circa 1986. It was predictably listenable.

And I worship at the altar of Elvis Costello. I've seen him 8 or so times live, I have nearly everything he ever recorded. That said, the countrified flavor of this album really really drags in parts. But when it's good, it's brilliant.

The last three, like I said, I just bought. Jimmy Eat World and Green Day I've heard a bunch of on The Only Radio Station Worth Listening To.

I bought New Pornographers based on some reviews I read. I do that sometimes and I've only really been burned once. Thus far I'm underwhelmed, but that's a good sign. I usually intensely dislike new stuff I buy when I first buy it, mostly because I'm pissed off that I don't instantly know all the words to all the songs. Why people keep insisting releasing songs I don't know is beyond me. Think of all the time we could save.

And the Green Day thing... it's a few tracks too long, but goddamn. It's all straightforward 4-chord rock-and-roll songs, just like every other Green Day song ever, but they still make it worth listening to.

Their 9-minute 5-part "Jesus of Suburbia" is the best thing I've heard in a long time. Not just songs, I mean including babies laughing, wind in trees, water over stones, etc.

The best "normal" song I've heard all year is "Bedlam" off the Elvis Costello album. It makes me think of Stevie Wonder. Not lame Stevie "That's What Friends Are For" Wonder, but funky "Superstition" Stevie Wonder.


TV I watched:

Er... too much. Because I'm a dork, I got to see all the Deep Space Nine episodes I'd missed on SpikeTV. Uh... I started watching Lost. Arrested Development is really good.

Look, I stay home all day. The TV gets turned on. It's not me being lazy, it's just... there. Get off my case. There are also:


Books I read:


Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor Frankl

Lords and Ladies
Men at Arms
Soul Music
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Feet of Clay
Hogfather
by Terry Pratchett

The Iliad
The Odyssey
by Homer

A History of the Church in England (partial)
by JRH Moorman

Beowulf
translated by Seamus Heaney

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (in progress)
by Douglas Adams

Plan of Attack
by Bob Woodward

The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Aeneid
By Virgil

This, apparently, was the year of the Grand National Epic. Homer and Virgil and Beowulf, all of which prove that violence in the media is as old as media. Plenty of blood spilt and brains splattered in glorious translated Technicolor.

Dostoyevsky was a slog. It would have been a slog at 250 pages, but it was more like 800 (I can't be bothered to check). That goddamn Russian took up like 4 months of my reading life.

I'm ashamed it's taken me this long to get to Adams.

And Pratchett puts out a book ever 6 months. I got started late, but I'm catching up. It's what I read in between heavier stuff, like a breath of air in between swells as I tread water. OK it's more like nitrous oxide, but that's what I need between Woodward and Frankl.

This is long, but I didn't want to get into all of this tomorrow, New Years Eve, when some of you might miss some of the excruciatingly detailed cataloguing of my life. You are welcome.

Hey shut up, I didn't make you read it. I'd offer your money back, but it's free. Your time however is another matter completely. That's non-negotiable. Sucker.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 10.0... It groans under the strain. Ah hell, this one goes to 11.


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 10:00 AM