Be Kind, Rewind ended up not being as good as I would want it to be, but I loved it nonetheless. As a comedy, none of the jokes really struck me as funny, despite the presence of people like Heather Lawless and Jon Glaser, not doing anything, but getting paid anyway. I like it for Michel Gondry getting naked with his process, and how, while it's less technically impressive than The Science of Sleep, it seems more open-hearted for the way it embraces community. It feels like a companion piece to Block Party in that way.

I really hope Gondry's next film ends up being the postulated Daniel Clowes collaboration of an adaptation of Master Of Space And Time, especially if the Clowes screenplay for a movie about the kids who made an adaptation of Raiders Of the Lost Ark ever gets made.

Until then I guess I am waiting for the release of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, and Tokyo, the film anthology including an adaptation of the Gabrielle Bell comic from Kramers Ergot 5.

Last night I watched a terrible movie. It was called Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko. It was a huge failure, barely released. It's a sci-fi movie that's completely unable to tell its story competently, and so reverts to voiceover narration. Those last two things apply to Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and that was my favorite movie of the year it came out. Southland Tales feels more like another argument that the world depicted in Idiocracy is already happening, with this feeling that its unable to get past vapidity, so steeped in the stuff is it. (It has an awful cast, consisting of big-name stars and Saturday Night Live cast members. Although also people who are smaller than SNL: Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds, Will Sasso from MadTV, a woman from Poltergeist.)

It also feels like it might be Richard Kelly's spiritual shield.

It is stupid nonsense, on every level, and one of those levels would have to be the way it keeps on heaping levels on. But: The moral of the movie is "Pimps don't commit suicide." This is literally said four times, one of which is the last line of the movie. It just makes me feel that all that vacuous shit- the movie is all vacuous shit, it makes me never ever want to live in L.A., for the way it's pointedly dumb- it's the world Kelly lives in, and that's probably a deliberate choice. I think I get the feeling of watching the movie of knowing where the guy's coming from- and it's a stupid place, that's mostly pot-smoke, knee-jerk liberal politics, and immersion in celebrity culture but I guess it gets him through the day. Donnie Darko was a popular movie with its cult following that probably existed for the same "Wait, I know exactly where you're coming from" reasons, it's just that, with this movie, where he's coming from is a place no one else can relate to. I do feel like I can recognize it, though: It's a garbage heap. There's no real sense of aesthetics, or value, or emotion- and I don't think any of that is intentional! I think it was all arrived at honestly, through being kind of stupid.

I can't recommend seeing it to anyone, even as I wish more people had seen it so I could know I wasn't hallucinating.

This story is amazing.

Last Wednesday, I was invited to be on the radio to play some records. I brought along a copy of Wooden Wand's Harem Of The Sundrum and The Witness Figg, thinking I'd play one of two songs that struck me as stand-outs. When I say "stand-outs" in regards to Wooden Wand, I am talking about songs that might not end up being the "best" over time, just that thing in radio parlance where something jumps out as a single, or something with more clarity of light than murky atmosphere. When there, on air, my mind blanked on what the second song was. I played "Vengeance Part Two" because, looking at the playlist, I couldn't remember what song "Eagle Claw" referred to.

Later on I realized 'oh right, that's the song where the chorus is "don't say your last words 'til you die".' A lyric I take to mean a refusal to lay down and die a living death, kind of a flipside to David Berman's "on the last day of your life, don't forget to die" line from the Silver Jews song "Advice To The Graduate." On another hearing, I heard the line differently, as "don't save your last words 'til you die," which is sort of the opposite sentiment, but, right, don't view your life as a narrative you can control. Both of these hearings, which are kind of opposites in terms of "What am I supposed to do with these awesome last words I have lying around to use?" apply to Wooden Wand's music in the way in which it's so all over the place in its alternation between psychedelic jam albums and more straightforward singer-songwriter stuff. I can't name a favorite, "best" Wooden Wand record. The best record for the jammy stuff is the Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice album The Flood. The best song-oriented record would be the James And The Quiet. This is for records that are actually released on labels, there are slews of CD-Rs around on bootleg networks whathaveyou. There's one I really like from a Spring 2006 tour where Hush Arbors covers Neil Young's Sugar Mountain with a series of high-pitched unnerving notes.

The constant records, under a bunch of different names, is what sort of frustrates the narrative impulse which probably is what makes someone popular- It's hard to place a clear progression, hard for people to agree on a favorite record. How many of the bad reviews of James And The Quiet were probably written by people who wanted jammy stuff? Music reviewers- who I don't hate at all, who I don't think are silly or worthy of mockery- are dealing in words, and end up receptive to narrative clarity. When the record Second Attention came out, filled with religious allusions, critics didn't know what to make of it, so they complained.

The next record made by the guy who uses Wooden Wand as an alias will be done under a birthname, on a major label, and is rumored to sound like Tom Petty.

So this post is a tribute to the scrambled musical path of Wooden Wand, where even the bad records have their moments. Good times.

I buy very few comics these days, due to budgetary constraints. It seems like people who buy more have lower standards, in a way that's not necessarily to their detriment. The more things you consume, the easier it is to evaluate something on its own terms. I think I can listen to music more honestly due to the volume I consume, but when I buy a comic, I tend to have unreasonable expectations- I expect it to work on every level a comic can possibly work, rather than as just an aesthetic experience.

Anyway, Kevin Huizenga's Ganges 2 works on every level a comic can work. I listed his stuff at the top of my 2006 list- his complete output that year. Then, in 2007, nothing came out, except for a minicomic called New Construction that I didn't read because I would've had to order it through a website that didn't have anything else that particularly appealed to me. Ganges 2 came out today, after a hiatus that would suggest a year spent working on it.

New Construction, apparently, had deleted sequences from Ganges 1, a suite of short stories. Something appeared on Huizenga's blog (linked to in my sidebar) that seemed like something from Ganges 2 in the middle of last year. In retrospect, it seems like that was probably the deleted sequence that appeared in the New Construction zine, and that shows up in Ganges 2 in expanded form. There, it was a small vignette, with a vaguely poetic ending. Here, it's a period piece set during the dot-com boom that allows for all sorts of tangents and details. When that poetic ending is reprised here, it's still not quite amazingly moving, but there's less weight on it after the extended narrative of the rest of it.

Huizenga exists at this point on the alternative comics spectrum between something like Chris Ware (Eddie Campbell might be a better comparison point) and something like Paper Rad. Here, he starts talking about video games, and their kind of abstracted relationship to nature, which is vaguely the province of Jacob Ciocci. There's also a really great scene describing a fictional platforming game using some Ben Jones-ish details for jokes. But there's this more bookish/short story way of going about it, with a more delineated cast of characters playing off of each other, and the politics of the day and interpersonal dynamics are drawn in detail. But the tone is closer to melancholy than depression, because people are capable of warmth and feeling in Huizenga's comics. Sometimes, Huizenga navigates the divide even further, by using crazy cartoony doodles to communicate some kind of abstract epiphany in thought process at a comics' climax. I love it when he does that, but it seems like his best comics don't do that, in favor of being more controlled and concrete. His three stories from Drawn And Quarterly Showcase that were reprinted in Curses don't do that, for instance. This comic doesn't do it either, but it does start off with this abstracted overture of drawing that seems like something out of issue 18 of Paper Rodeo. It's kind of superfluous filler compared to the generally literary thrust, but it's great for what it is.

These are generalities. Here are specific bits I liked: The strip of panels at the bottom of a page where Glenn drives home, goes to sleep, and dreams of corridors. Specifically, the rhythm, cutting from outside a car to inside, to then being outside of Glenn's sleeping head and then inside a dream sequence, and how that is inforced by the compositions.

I also like how, on the very next page, the vistas of the videogame remind me of the movie Black Narcissus. There's this gorgeous palette of shades of blue that make up the color in the comic, so the technicolor of that film isn't diminished by the one-color of the Ignatz books' format. Black Narcissus had all painted backdrops, in keeping with the videogame's artifice later highlighted: It's a deliberate allusion, but a subtle one.

There's other things- the strength of comics to balance the subjective and objective, and the way that the captions tell a parallel narrative to the drawings, which happens in Huizenga's comics a lot, and is almost not worthy of note, besides to point out how dynamic the depiction of action in the images is this time around, and how lived-in the narration is, compared to the sometimes facts-cribbed-from-books nature of, say, "The Curse." That had it's own strengths, in terms of information about starlings I didn't know, that made it pleasurable to read, but this development seems distinctly like artistic growth.

This isn't to say it's perfect, that every choice seems like a good one- I don't know why there's that drawing of Glenn's head popping off in the middle of a meeting, but it's still a great comic, and those moments where it becomes a little too excitable are just evidence of reach exceeding grasp in a way that seems like it should be expected from a great cartoonist actively trying to become a better one.

I'm sure I've talked about this before.

There is a scene that ends the documentary The Cruise, where Speed Levitch is standing in front of a door, pontificating. The door is labeled "Emergency Exit Only- Alarm Will Sound." It leads to the roof, or some kind of overlook. Speed is explaining how this sort of sign, this sort of wiring, is the opposite of "the cruise" as he defines it- being able to go wherever, being free. Sometimes these doors aren't alarmed at all, it's an intimidation tactic. You open it, and nothing happens. Although sometimes it's a silent alarm, and the police accost you within minutes.

He opens the door. No alarm goes off. He opens it wider, and because of the f-stop on the camera being for indoors, the frame fills with light and overexposure, and that's how the film ends.

It is an amazing moment of film-poetry, and it seems to capture an obscure feeling perfectly, through metaphor.

There are so many films being made, so much of everything being made. Sometimes it is worth it for when something like that happens, this weird metaphor added to the language, like the Gupta Empire coming up with the idea of zero. You know, that's why we have empires, or cameras and film stock.

Paper Rad news: That video Problem Solvers is amazing. Three segments, all with songs, all with lyrics that are hard to discern due to mixing, masterful use of Flash, very funny jokes. Also, apparently Wyld Fyle (the commerce-minded group of Jacob Ciocci, Ben Jones, and E-Rock) are doing a commercial for Corn Pops. And Extreme Animals did a cover of Archers Of Loaf's "Web In Front" at South By Southwest, that I would very much like to hear.

Newspaper news: The Stranger is a much better written paper than The Portland Mercury, with which it shares a design sense and probable owners. Portland is a better city than Seattle in almost all ways, but seems weirdly car-choked compared to most other cities in a way that kind of put me off.

Portland news: I went there to see the Boredoms and slept on sidebar-linked-blogger/shit-talker extraordinaire Ben Parrish's floor.

Music reviews: The new Silver Jews record is silly, although I like the parts where Cassie sings. Bands are letting me down in 2008!

Movie reviews: I started watching O Lucky Man!, the follow-up to If..., directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell. So far, so good. It's tonally closer to The Ruling Class than If..., at least so far. Partly this is because of the professionalism of its construction.

I just learned that one of my favorite books, John Barth's End Of The Road, was adapted into a movie starring Stacy Keach and James Earl Jones. It doesn't look good, per se, but there it is.

Sometimes I will get two bands confused with each other, before hearing either one. For example: The Afghan Whigs and Archers Of Loaf were the same band to me back in 2003, and when I was in middle school, Blur and Rush were indistinguishable. The most recent confusion for me to correct were the bands Ecstatic Sunshine and Awesome Color. Awesome Color are on the record label Ecstatic Peace, which is a fine label, but as I learned when they opened for Dinosaur Jr., Awesome Color are kind of terrible. The difference between Ecstatic Sunshine and Awesome Color is that the former are pretty, with volume kind of on the fringes of the sound in a way I know will dominate live, but Awesome Color are just kind of dumb.

Ecstatic Peace are from Baltimore and are signed to Carpark, kind of like Beach House and Dan Deacon. All these acts use different instrumentation from each other, but all seem kind of pretty, and have some kind of relation to volume. Even Beach House, who are totally quiet and gentle, have organ used as this blanket in this way that's like early nineties shoegaze. So far Ecstatic Sunshine doesn't seem quite as great as the others but I've just heard a few songs so far. (Also I think they're instrumental. They kind of have that "instruments playing themselves" feeling, but more stripped down than when you hear a bunch of musicians jamming out.)

This is probably worth another post of its own, but I just watched three movies starring Warren Oates in close proximity to each other. He is good in all of them, and all are pretty good. These movies were Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfigher, and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

Dash Shaw's Bodyworld webcomic is totally great.

So's the end of this interview with Andrew Earles, for completely different reasons. Edit to emphasize: Just the end, where the interviewer asks Earles to define a hipster on. The reviewer betrays his not really having his own thoughts and opinions in favor of received knowledge and it's great.

Persepolis isn't so good. I am referring to the movie, having not read the comic. I thought about reading it, though, when it came out a couple years ago, and was generally acclaimed across the board. In the time since I've started to feel like the critics I like reading didn't really like it. Marjane Satrapi did other comics, which seemed like they were largely ignored.

I don't think I've read a big bashing of the book though, which does seem to be what the public is crying out for.

I walked out of the movie, thinking of the vague criticisms that haven't been quite formulated into essay form by other people. I left not because it was egregiously offensive, but because I felt like I "got" it. Where it was going, that there was nothing to get. The history happens in the background, and is never really presented in a way that's actually useful- knowing that world events effect some people is probably not as politically useful as knowing why the things are happening. The actual happenings are all in the background. What's in focus is this ordinary girl. This is what some people think is amazing, this is what works for people. But even her life isn't that much in focus, in terms of actually giving you insight to it. Was any of it in focus? It all seemed a blur, of signifiers of "ordinary girl"- western pop culture- and signifiers of Iran- revolution and the Shah. But why were things happening? The most vivid moments don't seem like they're coming from anywhere. Which kind makes them less than vivid.

I keep on thinking of The Wire, which is wrapping up now, and presents such a view of the way people effect systems while still being a part of them, and doesn't depict any of them as evil, just sort of at odds with each other. It gives you a great deal of insight into how political systems and bureaucracies work, by depicting them as made up of people, and then showing the consequences of people's actions. It's in deep focus. There, things that happen seem "real" in a way that they don't at all in Persepolis.

Also, Persepolis- while probably looking better as animation than it did as a comic- doesn't look so great. It has an alright style- an interesting one, that does the job (I guess- in a lot of ways, another style could convey more about character, or feeling, or information about Iran or whatever virtues the work's supposed to have that I didn't really pick up) but there's never a dynamic composition. There's a lot of cartoonists whose style doesn't really work for me and seems generic but who are masters of body language or balancing an image. Yeah- not a lot of body language in this one. These are the things that actually convey things graphically, like character, rather than just vague events. It's the same thing- not a real eye for detail, things aren't in focus. Things aren't felt. So I walked out early, maybe missing some stuff, but kind of convinced I wouldn't due to the nature of autobiography.

(Huh, Neko Case is covering The Train From Kansas City in audio form in the other room. I didn't know she did that.)

I liked The Savages, though, with its Chris Ware poster, and its single allusion to the work of Lynda Barry, and its eye for real things. It's probably also somewhat autobiographical, but with an eye towards details, and with a plot controlled by its characters. The detail about the toes curling up, Laura Linney surprised someone would want to read an unproduced play- and the way Philip Seymour Hoffman never offered- a student asks "what's the difference between narrative and plot." It's not the most visually stylized thing, but then, it's not animated, and has actors to do the work of conveying feeling with body language. There's even sight gags! This is Tamara Jenkins' follow-up to Slums Of Beverly Hills, a movie that was essentially okay, and this is better than, while still not being completely awesome. Who knows what of it I will remember months from now? (Probably Philp Bosco writing "prick" on the wall.) Sure, other things- the use of prescription drugs, the bad sex- will fade into other movies that had a better eye for detail, or that I just saw first, but still, it's got scenes other than that- where the subject matter is, with the decision to put the father in a nursing home- all of that works, and is well-observed, and can be recalled easier than I can recall the history of Iran as depicted in Persepolis.

Sometimes I read news that makes me go "What the fuck? No fucking way, no fucking way!" like the retard I am but keep hidden. The news of David Fincher directing an adaptation of Charles Burns' Black Hole is the latest thing to do this, even with a crazy election going on. That could actually work really well.

Oh also: I like this band High Places. I wonder if having an album that's actually produced will ruin them or make them better- it seems like it could go either way.

I saw some movies recently:

Jodorowsky's The Rainbow Thief is really normal, despite the title seemingly implying a whole movie that never takes place. It's really light compared with something like Santa Sangre. It's spiritual tones- "money isn't important" are the sort of thing seen in other movies, but here filtered through vague allusions to alchemy and somehow more convincing for Jodorowsky's well-established kook credentials.

Nights Of Cabiria has this one absolutely amazing scene involving hypnosis. The majority of the movie still feels cynical, even if that's not its intent- it only seems to be able to throw off the shackles for a brief period of time.

WR: Mysteries Of The Organism starts off with some fascinating documentary footage of Wilhelm Reich's followers and townsfolk, and then everything else is kind of dull, from the narrative stuff in Yugoslavia to the documentary footage of people just trying to be sexually liberated. The ten to fifteen minutes of documentary footage is interesting. So's the DVD menu. Elijah Brubaker's Reich comic is pretty good so far though. (Oh wait, I guess three issues have been printed. When I say "good so far" I'm talking about the first issue, which is the only one to be shipped to stores thus far.) I prefer the free expressiveness of the art to the restraint shown in Chester Brown's Louis Riel, although there's some stylistic choices that seems not so well-done.

David Lynch's On The Air is great! I started watching in on VHS, and have so far seen the three episodes that actually aired.

Every episode just leads to this slapstick everything-goes-wrong-but-it's-all-right finale. There's stupid sound effects all over the place, and things repeat in each episode that aren't quite gags, but are just weirdness. Miguel Ferrer is a really good actor. There's also bits of extended sexual innuendo of the type that annoyed me on Arrested Development. Holy shit, was this show ahead of its time! Although also while looking back in time- there's all kinds of corniness and one character is your standard "foreigner" caricature.

David Lynch just directed the pilot, but like with Twin Peaks, his style hangs over the episodes he didn't direct. It's kind of the opposite of what you'd expect from him- a slapstick comedy- but the way in which he's present totally works and is amazing.

I'm not bemoaning the loss of it from the airwaves or anything, because part of the reason I like it is because it's clear (ABUNDANTLY clear) why it would be a failure, but I would bet money it was funnier than anything on ABC at the time, or since. It's completely the opposite of The Simpsons or Seinfeld- probably the only examples of funny things at the time- partly because of how assured it is in its corniness and lack of hipness. Which is mainly why it's so great. I laughed really hard at this show, but it's funny on a number of different levels.

It seems like this great companion piece to 30 Rock, actually, in that its that show's complete opposite.

An ongoing list of movies that aren't available on Netflix for one reason or another, that I have either seen and am now recommending, or and hoping to encounter at the video store the next time I go to look for rentals, which will be Monday. This doesn't count things that were never released, like the Timothy Carey movie The World's Greatest Sinner, which I do hope to see at some point. (I'll recommend to people watching the Stanley Kubrick movie The Killing, and trying to pay attention to the character Timothy Carey plays, especially if you don't know who he is- Just watch that movie looking for anyone who might be a great character actor and you'll have fun. That movie's great!) I also won't list things that are kind of recent or that rumor has as coming out shortly that can be saved on Netflix. I'll mention things that are available to be saved on Netflix if the movie in question is really old and more likely to be found on video.

Brewster McCloud: I have seen this. It's great. Bud Cort stars in Robert Altman's favorite movie that he directed- it feels like it influenced Wes Anderson way more than Harold And Maude, or any of the other movies Robert Altman directed that I've seen, but with this kind of fractured editing and a freewheeling style that's completely at odds with the more controlled nature of some of those other things.

A Matter Of Life And Death: This is Sammy Harkham's favorite movie, and even though he's not the greatest cartoonist, that guy's proven his taste. This is apparently in the upper-tier of Powell And Pressburger films. Black Narcissus is amazing, as is Peeping Tom, and to a lesser extent The Red Shoes. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp is good enough, and I haven't seen any of his other movies. I really want to see this.

Tampopo: This isn't available in a region one DVD. I tried to watch it on DVD on a player that couldn't handle it. The people I was going to watch it with have seemingly since seen it, presumably on VHS, and loved it. I've had it talked up to me quite a bit.

WR: Mysteries Of The Organism. This is on DVD! Criterion put it out this Summer! Netflix doesn't have it, although they have the director's follow-up, Sweet Movie, which is really filthy and I was totally into it. This is a kind of fractured-collage movie about Wilhelm Reich, and I guess also the political state of Yugoslavia in 1968? Anyway. The first issue of Reich, the comic book autobiography of Wilhelm Reich drawn by a dude who used to live in Olympia, is waiting for me to be purchased at the comic store the same day I rent this movie. The plans to build an orgone accumulator are delayed for the time being but will maybe start up again after that day.

Time Masters- Bryan Fordney said this was amazing and posted some screen grabs. I didn't look into it until now, when I found out it was the same director as Fantastic Planet, and has designs by Moebius! Dude!

On The Air and Hotel Room- the TV shows David Lynch around the same time as Twin Peaks. These actually are at the Olympia video store, unless they've been stolen since three years ago. If they're on VHS here, they might also be where you are.

The Rainbow Thief and Santa Sangre- I've seen the latter. It's pretty restrained and normal for Jodorowsky, although it has this sort of horror-movie vibe, and maybe the misogyny that people see in his comics but I don't get from The Holy Mountain at all. The Rainbow Thief stars Peter O'Toole, who you may know from the movie The Ruling Class, and Christopher Lee, who you may know from the movie The Wicker Man, if all you know about cinema is early seventies British-psychedelia films, which I think would be a totally fine thing for that to be all you knew. I really like the idea of them in a Jodorowsky movie. I also like the idea of just watching another Jodorowsky movie, actually. These are the last two movies he directed, in 1990 and 1988, respectively. Might as well bring up Tusk as well, from 1980, which might not be as good but I would probably watch.

Possession: Another movie recommended by Sammy Harkham! I don't know if people read that Family blog I link to, but I sure as shit do. This was brought to his attention by people who work at a famously great video store in Los Angeles. I bet they have this movie available. Note: They also screened it on film at the Silent Movie Theatre.

Phase IV: Another thing brought up on the Family blog. Saul Bass made a movie! It's a science fiction movie about ants! There's a lot of footage of ants running around because the plot sort of stops mattering to the film at a certain point! There's another movie with the same title starring Dean Cain that Netflix knows about but is probably terrible!

A Thousand Clowns: This used to be available on Netflix as a Play Now thing you could stream on your computer, but this laptop doesn't have the hard drive space for that. This is Jesse Thorn's favorite movie, he of The Sound Of Young America radio program that I also link to from the blog sidebar. Apparently it has both a man-child and a child-man as characters! I really want to see this.

Spirits Of The Dead: This is a horror anthology collection of three films, including one directed by Federico Fellini. I heard about this from that Eli Roth AV Club feature where he programmed a theoretical film festival. Apparently the other two movies aren't so great, but the Fellini one is amazing.

Hellzapoppin!: Alex Tripp had this shown to him in class once. Apparently it stars this old comedy duo, but this movie is really weird and plays with the form of cinema and cliches and whathaveyou. Alex loved it, and that guy is basically me when it comes to movie tastes.

The Landlord: Hal Ashby's first movie. Apparently kind of legendary in black cinema circles, I think? I hope to see it at some point. Maybe not so pressing as the others, but still.

Insignificance: Nicolas Roeg's career kind of fell apart after making a bunch of crappy movies, but this has kind of an interesting premise and a Jim O'Rourke album named after it. Jim O'Rourke's favorite movie, apparently, is Performance, by the way. This movie has no rock stars, but Gary Busey plays Joe DiMaggio.

Also it seems possible I'll end up renting Two-Lane Blacktop from the video store because Netflix has it as having a "very long wait." I'm not even sure I'll like that movie. I hope I like it enough to make it seem imperative that I see Cockfighter right away, because I like that that movie exists, but right now it seems like I will see it years from now because of how many other things I would rather see before that. (Apparently there's a scene in that movie where a dude presents the head of a rooster he bit off to his beloved as a gesture of his affection. Cinemaaaaa!)

The first part of this post is about Olympia:

My mom, who lives in the New Jersey suburbs, has talked to me about Olympia and its whiteness, its lack of urbanity. I tried to defend it to her, because she hasn't really spent any time here, and only knows what I tell her about it. I kind of defended it in bad terms, which I'll now redefine. Olympia, despite its lack of any real minority population, still has this culture that my mom and a lot of people like her romanticize and associate with different races, that's a lot "warmer" and more "wild" and "open" than people's traditional experiences with their neighbors. Someone at the Capitol Theater told me, that after they'd introduced me to someone and I was a huge weirdo and then ran off, that the person I was introduced to said "That's what I like about the Capitol Theater. People here are so different than what I'm used to." At the time I was just confused, but then I realized the thing how I was being viewed. That's the Olympia I live in, though.

The thing is, because it's done by white people, it's more easily accepted and integrated, dealt with. Right now, I believe, the single most popular record in the country is the soundtrack to Juno, composed largely by Olympia resident Kimya Dawson. I have nothing against Kimya Dawson at all. I am generally wary of things that are that embraceable, for reasons that have nothing to do with the thing being embraced: They can't help being lovable.

Oh right, that's a thing I wanted to bring up, that apparently there was, like, a half-a-million-dollar offer to her to write a theme for Wal-Mart? She turned it down.

I look around Olympia and see a place being developed in weird ways from what it was when I moved here, five years ago. Five years ago means I am in no ways from here. In all likelihood, the people moving into these condos popping up have a greater claim to this area than I do, as they're probably from neighboring towns I've never been to. Olympia's a safe place, with a lot less meth use than those places, and probably better schools. Incidents of violence are rare.

That story I told of being forced into a fight by some drunk out-of-towners the other week was notable for its oddity. The only thing that might keep property values down is the stupid anarchist/activist graffiti that we all suspect is being done by rich college kids who have recently moved to town. They're all stupid, but fuck it, god bless them for being unpleasant.

Still, areas filled of junk cars and old greenhouses are all getting cleaned up to make way for town homes and condos. I can't blame it on the pleasantness. I can't even call it gentrification yet.

But I do feel there's a thing out there in the mass culture that I find kind of offputting, encroaching upon some kind of graveyard. It seems possible it'll do good things- please god let it get Obama elected- (I'm sure that comes out of left field completely) but it is, in itself, its own blandness. Obama is nowhere near as bland as the last two Democratic nominees for President, as a person, but I think I'm just put off by the general mechanism that sways the masses.

The second part of this post is about movies and comics and music and shit.

This new mainstream would need to lead to a new "________" (multiple choice fill in the blank for a series of synonyms, with a) being something like "independent sphere" b) "underground" c) "counterculture") that could travel farther. The whole soft indie comedy is starting to feel at this point like Pulp Fiction-inspired neonoirs started to feel after Memento came out. (I like Memento, I'm citing it as a last hurrah.) I'm imagining a psychedelia that's vaguely informed by stuff like The Holy Mountain and the recently viewed Sweet Movie, only this time with satire that's actually funny. I saw Daisies after an interview in Arthur with Jimmy Joe Roche promoting Ultimate Reality. Ultimate Reality isn't quite the sort of the thing I'm talking about, but it's on the right track. It might vaguely feel like a poor man's Paper Rad, rather than an offshoot of its more narrative directons. (Man, that complete Cold Heat book can't come out soon enough. That kind of stuff might be exactly what I'm talking about. Only I imagine a movie instead of a comic, due to cinema's ability to integrate myriad parts to form an overwhelming whole and thus be accessible and communicative.) I talk about this sort of stuff all the time on this blog.

In addition to that stuff, I really like the movies made by Powell And Pressburger, The Archers. I just saw The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp- I'd tried to watch it before and couldn't make it through it, but that movie's pretty good. I was reading this thing about their mission statement, their list of thoughts- one was that a filmmaker needs to a be a year ahead of not just his peers, but the general trends, because a film takes a year to make. So, there's that.

I talked about Chameleon Street and the idea of a black Orson Welles. It turns out that some people think of The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp as a British Citizen Kane. Which it is nowhere near as good as, but: People talked about There Will Be Blood as being like Citizen Kane in terms of its American-ness, its story of capitalism sort of creating and destroying a man. The Powell and Pressburger film should probably be viewed as a British alternative in terms of not being about capitalism at all, so much as it is about manners and gentlemanly decorum falling out of favor as time goes on. Which means its not as interesting. (Meanwhile, A Matter Of Life And Death is called the British Wizard Of Oz and is apparently Sammy Harkham's favorite film, and is completely unavailable in the U.S. on DVD.)

As someone who doesn't care about Bob Dylan at all, I'm Not There just made me want to see Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. This isn't to say it's bad: It's a fine movie, but it's at its best when its able to depict something other than Bob Dylan saying cryptic things in interviews and press conferences, which is approximately a third of the film- Essentially, that's all Ben Whishaw's depiction does.

I don't intend to post everytime I receive a compliment, but oh man. This is from my friend Jamie, who is currently a member of the band World History, who you should see while she's still in the band. About my movie, she said, in an e-mail, that it "reminded me of a harmony korine film, but with a lot more substance. and without the artsy arrogance. or chloe sevigny. i hate chloe sevigny." Thanks Jamie! (For future reference, I will only post compliments of me that include insults of other people. I might also just post any insult of other people that I am told I can post.) Jamie is also the only person to have paid for a DVD, as all other copies have been given away for free. She gets a thousand gold stars. If anyone wants a copy of that movie, "The Reason Why Our World Is Coming To An End," or the DVD I burned today, where I tell a version of "the aristocrats" for twenty minutes that I recorded in early 2006, after a winner of the contest to be a DVD extra was already announced, but before I learned that submissions had to be under ten minutes, contact me.

From an article about Michel Gondry, which I will link to, I learned he is dating the cartoonist Gabrielle Bell, which makes the fact of his adapting one of her comics more sensible. Still, there's a thing in that profile about Gabrielle, on the set, drawing in her notebook, which is notable for how awful it is:

"She goes back to her sketchbook. She draws everything longer and sadder than it appears in real life, like she’s making the world over in her image."

Later on, it goes on to call dating a shy cartoonist a "concept." What? I know exactly what the writer means but it's clear to me thats an assholish point of view to possess.

Oh, also, Human Nature and The Science of Sleep both ruled. Come on. Come ON.

The article also talks about an installation at Deitch Projects that sounds ill. You know- it's a great article for the Gondry stuff and terrible for any and all insertions of the writers' voice. (The idea of the "film club" is pretty similar to something I've conceptualized myself. The idea of making "exquisite corpse" films with Spike Jonze never occurred to me though.) Obviously, GQ is a magazine for assholes but I don't think I'd ever read an article from them to confirm this. Whoops.

It's offensive for being both sexist and really- I don't know, capitalist? Enamored with the idea of wealth and status? Confused by comics because there's no money in it, and condescending to Gondry for being able to look past that? It's kind of gross. GQ scribes shouldn't feel like they are better than the dude who made the "Let Forever Be" video. Not because they're magazine writers and Gondry makes movies- any respect shown is based on that weird fallacy- but because no one is better than that video. It has nothing to do with consumption and everything to do with creation.

I just watched Chameleon Street. It lives up to its hype, in a very specific way that was kind of incalculable and unimaginable. Not because it's off-the-charts amazing, but:

Okay. The story with this is that it was made in 1990, and was the hit at Sundance, championed on the jury that year by Steven Soderbergh and New York Press film critic Armond White. This was before 1995 and The Brothers McMullen and the world of fake-indie prestige pictures that now constitute Sundance, as my understanding would have it. The director, Wendell B. Harris, was hailed by those championing him as a black Orson Welles- he wrote/directed/starred in the film.

He didn't make any movies after this though, because due to the way the film industry/market works, there's not really a market for a black Orson Welles.

Why the movie is interesting is this: What does the idea of a black Orson Welles making movies in 1990 that debut at Sundance- what does that even mean? What does that look like, culturally?

It's like the sort of self-aggrandizement found in Citizen Kane (and F For Fake) and rap lyrics, but played out in this intellectual milieu of correcting the grammar of a racist's profanity, and smoking Thai Stick (I like how in any kind of anything if people are going to get specific about weed without just saying a general euphemism, Thai Stick is inevitably what comes up) but not blowing dudes while in prison. It also means Godard-influenced editing, and 1990s video-effects credit sequences (still preferable to the Final Cut Pro defaults you see today). It has a handful of great scenes, but it still seems more like its mired by its braggodocio in the bad scenes than that the good scens justify it. It's the good scenes that have you cringing and covering your face, though, while the bad scenes just make you go "oh, this is what a black Orson Welles would be like circa 1990."

There's a 33-minute long trailer on the DVD for a movie called "Arbiter Roswell" which he's spent 13 years working on, a fact I found out only after putting it in the mailbox. You should watch it and tell me how it is. (The full movie is supposedly three hours long and not finished being edited yet.)

I wrote about Julie Klausner before, when her NYC Tourist Beat video got me into watching every other video she had made. Apparently, she's doing a Superdeluxe series with Michael Kupperman this year, but until then, there's her newest thing, which is hilarious.



She may as well be a lesbian for the way she is one of America's Heroes. She elaborated on the mockery of that video with a blog post.

Last Year At Marienbad is one of the stranger films I've seen lately, even considering the fact that as of late I've been deliberately seeking out such things after realizing that's where my enthusiasms lie. Last week I saw the Czech film Daisies, which has considerable charms. I knew going into it that it was a weird one, that people had no idea what to make of it at the time of its release in 1961, although it was generally highly-regarded. I, watching it at 4:30 AM, kept awake by a drunken roommate, also didn't know what to make of it. It goes on for long enough that you eventually start to make sense of it, but the first couple of reels or so have a pretty steep learning curve.

Even then, there came a point where I was thinking that it was either a) a cinematic appreciation of the art of sculpture or b) a dissection of the bourgeois a la Luis Bunuel but less crass. I don't think either of those are true now that I've finished watching the film. But still, getting into it requires being into Hollywood-cinema style, in terms of both exploded silver halide lighting and expensive production design, really great black and white widescreen compositions, a feeling of impending horror-movie doom, and video art style repetition. At the beginning it feels almost exactly like a lot of video art, only shot on film, and a hell of a lot better.

It's kind of impossible. One of my favorite things in film- animation does this sometimes- is to be really experimental and all over the place, trying out new techniques in keeping with themes that that's a good way to live your life, to be daring. I like when films don't mind being distractingly formal because it works towards its own ends using those distractions. This is really experimental in a "I have no idea how that was done" kind of way, in a way that works towards ends of confusion and disassociation. It's the sort of thing most easily associated with dreams or drugs, specifically the "edge of freaking out" side of those things and experiences. It maybe goes on a bit too long and wears out its welcome, but it's the fact that it does that actually lets you into maybe understanding it.

Sometimes when something is really popular I'm like "oh gross it's got the internet's cum all over it."

That has nothing to do with anything I'm about to write about, I just thought it was funny enough to write on a blog. You can use it in your own day-to-day conversation, depending on the type of people you talk to.

One thing that was liked by a lot of people I respect was Renee French's The Ticking, which I just got around to reading. Actually, people whose tastes are similar to mine liked this book more than other things I liked a lot when they were making best-of-2006 lists. It's a fine book. Beautiful, moving, I read it while drinking green tea in my bed. Both it and There Will Be Blood used the ellipsis in a vaguely off-putting way, skipping over large periods of time suddenly, even though they were in general slow-paced works. It's fine, it's necessary for the pacing, but reading it after seeing There Will Be Blood made me think of them as pieces in tandem, as fine pieces where my own biases made me like other things more. (Although I genuinely believe that Punch-Drunk Love is better than There Will Be Blood, whereas my preferring that Brendan McCarthy Solo to The Ticking is totally just my own kind of stupid preferences.)

Recent movies taken out from the library, and that have shown up through either me or my roommate's Netflix queue, in the order I think they should be watched for the sake of progression:
1. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
2. Last Year At Marienbad
3. Ultimate Reality (by Jimmy Joe Roche with soundtrack by Dan Deacon)
4. The Elegant Universe disc 2

The last is my roommate's, but I think it's funny he received it the same day as I got something called Ultimate Reality. All in all I am just thinking about the Lil Wayne lyrics about smoking weed by the acre and being "so high I could eat a star."

For my class taught by friends of mine we have both blogs and the ability to comment on what other people have to say. The comments have subject lines, and I think I am going to title all of my comments "Here's what Brian Nicholson has to say about this!" because that's the most obnoxious thing imaginable, besides possible saying "fuck all y'all: here's what Brian Nicholson has to say about this!"

So, on Friday night, walking to catch the 11:30 bus after The Blow show, a guy in an AC/DC hoodie started to sidle up. He asked me something that sounded like "When's the last time you got bled?" to which I responded "Did you just ask me when was the last time I got bled?" He was kind of mumbling, kind of slurring his speech, and his response to that was something along the lines of "I'm just fucking with you" but he continued to sidle up real close. He asks if I want to fight, I say no. I don't really remember the entirety of the conversation. He was clearly drunk. There were implications that he wanted to get in a fight, or just gaybash. I eventually stopped walking, he walked away to his friend at the bus station. I turned around and walked in the opposite direction.

A guy rides up to me on a bike. "Were you talking shit on my boy?" "No." He yells back "Hey, is this the guy?" to a dude who is not wearing an AC/DC hoodie, but rather, is shirtless. I cross to the other side of the street. The bike rolls up in front of me, kind of perpendicular to the side of Dumpster Values, fencing me in a little. Shirtless dude has now fully sidled, and bike guy says "Look, you're going to fight my friend or I'm going to fuck you up."

I have no problem with fighting an asshole. I feel weird about fighting an asshole when the only other person around is the asshole's equally assholish friend. Also, I am wearing glasses. But anyway, a tussle ensues, I don't think I do any damage when I punch the guy because I am in something of a headlock. Eventually, we're down on the sidewalk to curb area, I am trying to smash his head against a parking meter or else gouge out his eyes with my thumbs, (although I'm concerned about the other friend standing guard) meanwhile I am worried about being curb-stomped. I at some point yell "Hey does anyone want to help me out so I don't have to fight this asshole" and shortly thereafter some big dudes wearing jackets with Dead Kennedys patches pull him off me. My glasses are scratched and I keep on imagining myself dead with my jaw hanging off, blood dripping onto the Andrew Jeffrey Wright silkscreened rainbow beard t-shirt, body found outside a pizza place I don't particularly care for.

Follow-up to the post about Cerberus Shoal- I grabbed a copy of "The Vim And Vigour Of Cerberus Shoal and Alvarius B," which it turns out is a collaboration with Alan Bishop. It's pretty good. I didn't remember this at the time of buying it, but in the WFMU blog entry that told me about Big Blood, this album was cited as one of the writer's favorite recordings of all time. A good find then, for nine dollars, from Philadelphia's AKA Music.

It's odd to think of all this talk praising Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood as a major evolution of style and maturity. While watching it, I thought "This is no Boogie Nights," with Boogie Nights being my previous least-favorite film of his. It makes me wonder what film critics consider maturity. I guess it's making a film that is an actor's showcase, rather than one that demonstrates an ability to recreate shots from I Am Cuba.

It's also more cynical than any of Anderson's other movies, less open-hearted, warm, and forgiving. I talked about a film critic who argued that film critics value cynicism more than humanism, which is why Billy Wilder is so beloved. I think Billy Wilder's great, personally, and I have a large place in my heart for cynicism. I didn't hate There Will Be Blood, I liked it just fine, but I think that it might be being overrated by critics right now, at least in relation to the director's other work. (I have no problem with people saying it's one of the best films of the year, although if I were to make a list, I'd probably put it below Superbad.)

I think it shortchanges a lot of the things that makes Anderson interesting and enjoyable. A reviewer for Philadelphia Weekly, in his top ten list, ranked it number four, with Zodiac as number one. He said that Anderson did the second-most-interesting stylistic shift, after David Fincher. Zodiac also kind of does a disservice to some of Fincher's skills and point of view. I bring this up because the two directors are opposed, with P.T. Anderson actually having made shots at Fight Club. I would take Anderson's side in that argument, and can't really bemoan the switch-up with Zodiac nearly that much- Less glib nihilism is fine by me.

All the Citizen Kane comparisons are bullshit though. That movie has Orson Welles' fingerprints all over it, and he identifies with the character's ambition, and that's what helps make the movie work. There Will Be Blood isn't about an ambitious man, just a misanthropic one. Anyway in which the film adopts the characteristics of its subject is probably to its detriment.

No Country For Old Men is good. It is disheartening that I'm not going to see There Will Be Blood this year. Before No Country, there was a trailer for a horror film about vagina dentata, and in the lobby a movie poster for a new Michael Haneke movie whose slogan is "you must admit you brought this upon yourself." I'm not saying the names of either of these movies because I would put them in bold for the sake of formatting and then it might seem like an endorsement.

The first half of 2007 was better than the second half, because I made movies, and my friends had yet to move away. Now, there aren't really enough people around to make a movie with, and so my life is boring and I haven't had anything interesting to talk about in terms of life experience for several months.

Happy new year, everybody. May your New Year's Eve be filled with just enough introspection to work out how to make the next year better. That level of epiphanic thinking is pretty much the perfect amount of drunk to be- The memory intact, but no sadness-dwelling.

For Christmas, I got a copy of George Saunders' The Braindead Megaphone. I also was in a car accident, and that was pretty brutal, but I think I can skip over that. But the Saunders book now sits finished, so I might as well review it.

It is too bad, the way the book world works. The main problem with The Braindead Megaphone is the insertion of things that are clearly humor pieces, in a book labeled "essays," where the essays are really great and make a lot of smart arguments that seem to condemn the more simplistic humor pieces, such as "Ask The Optimist" or "Woof." In Persuasion Nation was similarly split between serious short stories and pieces of glib comedy. At the time, I wished he could reconcile these two sides. Now, I just think that the books need to be more carefully edited. The pieces that are weak here- well, they would've been weak if they had been in In Persuasion Nation, but they would've fit in better. Especially if the more serious pieces had been held off for another book. The book world wants what it wants, and doing what I propose would mean three books released at some point in the undefined future, rather than the one-book-every-two-years schedule which is preferable to book companies and customers. Authors too, probably: Having these sides pressed up against each other forces you to engage the scope of the author's vision, rather than just specific facets of their voice.

The reportage in The Braindead Megaphone is pretty great. Some of it was viewable on the internet- Stuff that kind of bridges the line between the straight journalism and the more humorous stuff by choosing a selectively ironic tone- This would be "A brief study of the British" I'm referring to, although "Nostalgia" which follows it in the book I would consider kin, even as it gets closer to humor writing. It's still in the vein of an essay. The piece about Dubai, or the "Buddha Boy" essay, written for GQ, are straightforward journalism, and great. The title essay makes a decent argument and would be a fine opening statement for a book of essays, and is the kind of thing that really makes me think the lesser pieces should not be included.

Then there's four parts of literary criticism: One for Johnny Tremain, one for Slaughterhouse Five, one for a Donald Bartheleme short story, and one introduction to an edition of Huckleberry Finn. These are great pieces, inspiring pieces, that make a person want to write, even as they teach lessons. They are not grouped together in the book, but they do appear in the sequence I list them in, and each brings with it a lesson. Johnny Tremain, read early, taught a lesson about the importance of language sculpting. Slaughterhouse Five is read later, and teaches a number of lessons, but one of the things sort of addressed but not brought up is how in the time since Johnny Tremain, views about how language should be sculpted had become calcified into unusable and foolish shapes. Vonnegut taught Saunders a lot. The lessons Saunders gleaned from Vonnegut and Esther Rhodes are ones I've already learned. The things Saunders talks about in relation to Bartheleme and Twain aren't as instinctual, at least not to me. Great pieces, and why have I not read Donald Bartheleme?

I didn't like Huck Finn when I read it in high school and haven't tried since. But reading these pieces and then going back to write these things I'm writing, I got mad at the way my own highly specific tastes have fucked my voice.

Oh wait: This is the only book I've read this year that came out this year. I also got a copy of Steve Erickson's Zeroville, which is an example of the problem: Both Erickson and Saunders have all their books emblazoned with a Pynchon quote extolling their respective virtues, and then I go about, mining similar vibes. Recognizing the caliber of a gun, looking down its barrel, not really able to get out of the way.

Oh yeah, car crash: First Christmas in years my mom spends Christmas morning with her two sons, and then, leaving the house to go to another family member's house, we are hit in an incident that I didn't quite witness the cause of. Suffice it to say: The car what did the crashing (oh by the way: other people completely at fault) smashed into me, backseat on the driver's side, more than anyone else in the car, although it mostly just hit the wheel on that side, popping tires and breaking an axle completely in a way that requires the car (bought my mom I think a month or two ago) to be replaced. I made fun of my mom for getting a world-fucking gashuffing behemoth, but then I didn't die after getting hit by a car. I do hope for the vehicle to be replaced by something that's less of a terrible beast, but my mom, being very uptight even after no one is hurt and is taking the way time progresses in stride, was very shook up and will probably buy an even more ridiculous thing with whatever insurance money she can muster.

Has anyone who reads this heard the band Cerberus Shoal? Not just heard of them, but listened to a record or two? They have broken up, but become a bunch of other things- They were something of a collective. Anyway, two bands to exist in their wake- Fire On Fire and Big Blood- run around putting out CD-Rs (records to come in the new year) but what I've heard, in mp3 form or on WFMU has been pretty great. The Big Blood stuff especially. They cover Can's Vitamin C! Really well!

They play folk music kind of in the vein of Comus, and I think they live in Portland, Maine. I'm under the impression that Cerberus Shoal were more on some sort of crazy Sun City Girls esque trip, but I can't confirm this. Can YOU? Can you even define what I mean when I say "crazy Sun City Girls esque trip?" Dante's Disneyland Inferno is more along the lines of what I mean, as opposed to Torch of the Mystics, but those are two records out of a very large discography.

I found something kind of interesting: a "Top 100 things" list made by Matt Groening probably around the time of the height of the Simpsons popularity. It's a sidebar. It's an interesting mix of counterculture staples that are really great (Joseph Heller!), popular culture, comics from the eighties that seemed good at the time but probably don't hold up, and esoterica from around the world- Satiyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, beloved by my friend Joel Brazzel, comes in right behind The Catcher In The Rye.

Also, yesterday I watched the Half Japanese documentary that Jeff Feuerzeig made 10 years before he made The Devil And Daniel Johnston. In the footage of the recording of a cover of "I Heard Her Call My Name" with Mo Tucker playing the drums, one of the other not-a-Fair-brother members is wearing one of those bootleg Black Bart Simpson T-shirts that I now associate with Andrew Jeffrey Wright. On this shirt, Black Bart Simpson is chasing after Black Betty Boop. One of the more famous Half-Japanese photos involves Jad Fair wearing a Destroy All Monsters t-shirt. Destroy All Monsters is a thing I think of as being a forerunner of the Fort Thunder movement which Andrew Jeffrey Wright was on the periphery of. The guy from Half-Japanese is wearing the shirt not as a reference to AJW, rather those Black Bart Simpson shirts were just a thing in the culture at the time, whereas now they're more of an element to be collaged or whatever. The Destroy All Monsters book, Geisha This, is currently available at the Picturebox site, and I very much want to buy it, but do not have the money this Christmas season. It's got a flexi-disc, when Picturebox was making the Black Dice book they wanted to put in a flexi-disc but there's only one manufacturer these days and its prohibitively expensive. Geisha This was made in 1995, one year after the Half-Japanese documentary, and probably two years after Matt Groening made his list of the best things.

Later that day, when rereading comics, I discovered that the artist Rita Ackermann (high-profile work includes the cover art to the Thurston Moore album Psychic Hearts, and an interview in the last ANP Quarterly, where I learned she's friends with Gang Gang Dance) appears in Paul Pope's science fiction comic Heavy Liquid, as an old woman, because the comic is set in the future. Paul Pope also wrote and drew Presidential candidate Ron Paul's favorite Batman comic, which I bought for a quarter a few years ago, in an example of capitalism not working.

Politics blogging: Joe Lieberman endorses John McCain for president. That won't help anyone.

The other night, at the Capitol Theatre, I projected Sean Penn's Into The Wild, which is a terrible movie. I had a weird reaction to it, one not as visceral as I get with other movies- I was actually viewing it and reacting to it largely on technical grounds. I kept on thinking, over and over again, "oh, that's a bad decision." The way the text appears on screen in yellow, the use of voiceover as this thing that seemed outside the rest of the narrative, the editing decisions. It was really not very well-made, no matter what sympathies people might feel to the subject matter. It is weird to suddenly start seeing a movie with that kind of filmic sense, that throught process. I actually felt like I could do a commentary track for it.

Today, by way of a link at the Family blog, found in a great post about Saul Bass, I ended up at a movie blog, which linked to an interview with movie critic Armond White, who I don't agree with on everything, but at least has an interesting perspective, which allows him to be right about things like Wes Anderson while being wrong about things like Billy Wilder. He sings the praises of a movie called Chameleon Street, from 1990, which, if my understanding is correct, is made by a black man, shot on video, and aspires to Orson Welles. Sounds great! Netflix has it as being out on DVD this Tuesday. Netflix doesn't have the movie Saul Bass directed about giant ants, though it does have the movie of the same title that stars TV's Dean Cain.

Tonight I projected Kurt Cobain: About A Son, which is not very good, but is interesting to me because of the footage of Olympia, shot not while Kurt Cobain was alive, but fairly recently. It includes footage of the Yes Yes, an alternative art space where I saw a lot of great shows that only lasted a year. Immortalized on film is the writing on the window in red marker "The Yes Yes needs $1500 for rent this month."

Then, I came home and watched Kim Ki-Duk's Time. Which is a good movie. It's not as transcendent as 3-Iron: there comes a point where the ending is vaguely imaginable, it's a bit repetitive (although deliberately), and maybe a tad misogynist. It's still very good, and in terms of things like shot compositions, it's probably better than any other Kim Ki-Duk movie I've seen. There's also more dialogue, I think, although I don't remember Bad Guy too vividly. Really interesting psychology, great images, and the vague impression of there being something to think about to think through the movie. Right now it strikes me as being similar in some ways to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, although without the same depth of feeling to its plot movements. I don't know what to say about it, besides recommending it. It really invigorated my love for Ki-Duk, after not seeing any of his films for over a year, because the things I saw that weren't 3-Iron weren't as good as that first film.

Do the kids still listen to Wu-Tang? I told a guy I work with I bought the new Wu-Tang Clan album, and he was surprised they are still making music, and thought that a current album would be terrible.

He is wrong, it is pretty great, except for the track with the Beatles sample and John Frusciante and Erykah Badu. Generally, a lot of the songs where RZA playing the bass takes up a lot of the space in the mix (actually, the predominant trait to the mixes is how open they are, so maybe that is not how I should phrase that) are not as good as the ones that utilize samples- Good use of Nancy Sinatra!

Speaking of Nancy Sinatra: I bought the new Wu-Tang from a Best Buy (Loss leaders! And also it turns out there's an exclusive bonus track, which is awful on exactly two levels) because I had to do the work Secret Santa thing for someone I had never met. I found out it's someone on disability, and was glad I hadn't gotten her something embarassing, based on not knowing that fact, for example "These Boots Were Made For Walking: The Best Of Nancy Sinatra" which is not a compilation I'm certain exists. Does Nancy Sinatra have a lot of good songs? Would such a best-of be a good buy in general given the person in question is able to walk/dance? I think it probably would be.

I will be listening to 8 Diagrams a lot, but it is not going anywhere near the top ten list. Neither's the new Ghostface. And so, I regret nothing.

The floods in Washington that made national news did not actually effect me. However, I learned that the last place I used to live- a duplex in a complex, off a relatively well-traveled road- was flooded. I ran into the neighbor I shared a wall with, she told me that water seeped through the walls and into the carpet, with the back door unable to be opened, and the front door a tricky proposition. This was weird to me: Huh, there's a disaster that I averted, seemingly narrowly, although I moved out five months before.

The other night I picked up the Chris Ware edited McSweeney's 13, and looked at the Gary Panter short story, "Nightmare Studio." He mentions, in talking about visiting Bruce Tibbetts' house in a dream, "As is common in dreams about departed friends, there is water damage in the house." I lived at that house with my best friend, and left those months ago because he moved back to Alaska. There were no dreams, just the mental imagery of the house turned ruined, that rung with this resonance.

It is this talk of Gary Panter and absent friends which I might as well use to lead off this talking about Tekkon Kinkreet, which is probably the best comic I read this year.

(Oh- 1-800-Mice has been canceled as of issue two, but there'll be a graphic novel in the fall of next year. I'm going to post this as a comment in my original review, but might as well say it here too.)

It's from Japan, which is really surprising to me. Japanese comics, generally, strike me as terrible, and this is a thing I've been trying to work out the whys and wherefores of. I like Japanese movies just fine. When I was talking about this online with Bill Randall, who lives outside Tokyo and is kind of an expert on these things, he pointed out that the big figures in Japanese cinema are heavily indebted to American cinema- Howards Hawks and John Ford are respected and emulated by the likes of Kurosawa, but manga has its own lineage. Obviously, it can't really be expected that I would be into the mainstream popular stuff, but even the alternative/underground Japanese comics, which have their own separate lineage, have problems. Shigeru Sugiura, who Dan Nadel of Picturebox referred to as "the Herriman of manga" because of the whole branch of comics weirdness that stems from him, looks clip-art stiff compared to the aliveness of a Krazy Kat strip. Everything that descends from him strikes me as equally stiff- Bill Randall also says that in most Japanese comics drawing culture, copying is taught, not figure drawing- I got the implication that figure drawing isn't a big part of the Japanese visual culture at all, which struck me as really weird. Also, a lot of the manga being published right now, the stuff that's doing gangbusters in Barnes And Noble, is "unflipped"- the image progression reads right to left, even though the words, translated and in English, read left to right- which strikes me as completely counterintuitive, although it's possible to learn how to do it. (Brian Chippendale's comics read back and forth, left-to-right and then right-to-left, so your eye stays focused on panel to panel movement and never goes up from the page.) One artist doesn't have the whole page flipped, but goes in digitally to move the panels to the alternate side of each other, which I find interesting from a composition perspective. I find the whole idea of flipping large sets of images interesting from a compositional perspective. But even though Akira is flipped to read left-to-right, I still think that comic's fucking unreadable and baffling for some reason- it just puts me off completely.

Somehow, this comic got through all those filters. It didn't a couple of years ago though, when it was published as Black And White in a series of three digests that I just read the first one of. It really didn't make any impression on me then. The new printing is bigger now, which makes the images breathe, and the story is all there in one chunk. But really, my response was so strong on this reread that the fact that I didn't like it the first time is near-baffling.

The drawings are the main thing. It has a weird balance of looking like it's drawn by a little kid and being completely solid- The perspectives are skewed, buildings bend, but it never becomes confusing that you're looking at a building, even as the panel has the buildings on the side, with the composition centered on a drawing of a moon with a face on it. It's all drawn at odd angles that avoid that clip-art feeling. There's all these retarded drawings- There's one of a car that I'm particularly obsessed with, the way it looks molded out of clay. It's a deliberate choice- No. 5, by the same artist, does not have kids for protagonists, and is a lot more solid, and somehow it goes back to the level of being not quite readable of almost every other Japanese comic I've read. Osamu Tezuka's Ode To Kirihito is pretty much the only other manga I could read, and that likewise is this weird cartooning tour de force of style-switching and casual avant-garde approaches. In Japan, seemingly, comics styles that are solid are only so because they've cooled to the point of congealing.

Gary Panter's comic drawn for the Japanese market, Cola Madnes, is influenced by Japanese underground comics, seemingly, in how sparse it is, and how the figures relate to each other spacially. His ratty line is what stops it from looking like clip art and brings it back to looking like the marks on paper that all of his work looks like. When I say that Tekkon Kinkreet carries with it some of Panter's power (Paper Rad call him Gary Panther for a reason), that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that basic level of sloppiness, combined with perfectly understandable drawings, that allow drawings to shift up their style and communicate feeling.

Feeling, it turns out, when reading it all together, is what this comic has in spades. It's about, on one level, male friendships, as this sort of thing that is able to stop the natural violence and craziness of the individuals. This is true about all relationships, but in this story, it's specifically about violence. When the characters get separated, it's more affecting to me here than in Goodbye, Chunky Rice due to the way that things go badly in terms of people's actual behavior as they fall apart, rather than just pine and feel lonesome. It's also more affecting to me because of the drawing. (Goodbye, Chunky Rice is still a good comic though, with its own strengths to the drawing.)

On another level, it's about gentrification. Which is what Brian Chippendale's Ninja was about, which I've already talked about in terms of its relation to Gary Panter.

On another level, it's a fight comic. One of the things I like about Japanese comics is the terminology. Things actually get called "fight comics." The word "manga" literally translates to "irresponsible pictures," which would be both a good name for a comic shop and an exploitation film production company. I don't like how Japanese comics are mostly just broken down by genre into demographics- one for boys, one for girls, one for men, one for women. (The stuff for boys and girls is what mostly is translated and popular. American women read the stuff for girls- I'm not sure what the stuff for women even is, as I'm under the impression that even the stuff featuring gay romance designed to appeal to a female readership is technically for girls. The stuff for men is really violent.) The really weird underground stuff doesn't get broken down, I don't think. It's kind of baffling to me. Anyway, one critic, responding to another critic who was asking "wait, are there Japanese comics for adults? I know there are American comics for adults, thanks New York Times!" brought up Tekkon Kinkreet. Another critic said "No, Tekkon Kinkreet is just a marginally more sophisticated version of these comics for little boys that are really popular. You should've mentioned these comics about the bombing of Hiroshima!" I jumped in to explain the whole Gary Panter not being Chris Ware thing. Tekkon Kinkreet might not read like literature, but it does read like really great comics, which is an argument that's foreign to a reviewing culture used to saying things like "a good graphic novel can be equivalent to a prose novel." Different mediums have different strengths. I get something different out of a Borges collection than I do a P.T. Anderson movie. (Has there ever been a short film as good as the best short stories? I'm pretty sure there hasn't been.) A main strength of Tekkon Kinkreet is how the violence is drawn: Movement is captured well, generally, and so is psychological intensity. From this, some of the drawing is kind of free-associative symbolism, in a way that couldn't be done in another medium. Towards the climax, fish are just drawn flying through the air, sort of as a visual-language leitmotif that doesn't really distract from any of the other elements. Wait, flipping through it again, maybe that doesn't happen. There are drawings of fish though, thrown in as symbols in their own panels, adding to the energy of a page as a single unit, though.

Somehow, over the course of reading it, I felt it all start to add up, the weight of one drawing after another. The way individual drawings worked, added up into the way entire pages worked as a piece of design, and then intuitively by force of the narrative just got piled into this even bigger shape, that after 614 pages of skewed perspective things start to look differently. My only complaint about the book is the use of this kind of distressed font which can also be found on the cover of the last Melt-Banana album. It is about as important here as it is on that record- You're not staring at the front cover when an album like that plays.

I got into an argument on the internet awhile ago, over the nature of videogames. In this conversation, I came off as a philistine, because the argument I was making runs counter to standard party lines. I thought where I was coming from was completely understandable, but the person I was arguing with thought I was just talking crazy talk. My argument will be reiterated here.

Games don't work as storytelling mediums. They can't do what a movie does, no matter how cinematic their creators try to be. The whole nature of there being something that someone else controls works against the natural storytelling impulse, and specifically, the ability to have an ending reinforce themes.

This isn't to dismiss them as their own thing, or to say that they're useless because they can't tell a story. I think their strength is this weird meditative aspect, of doing something over and over again to get further and further. I like them as reverse Buddha Machines, designed for the eyes and hands, as opposed to being listened to. World exploration also fits into this.

The idea that as technology improves, games will become more cinematic is an awful one, completely opposed to what I find useful or interesting. Most games I like are over ten years old at this point, but that doesn't mean that the technology is a dead-end. I keep on imagining bigger worlds.

I bring this up because I had further aesthetic differences with the person I was arguing with: He wrote a thing about comics where he stated that the drawing doesn't always matter, but the writing always does. I don't know if I can get into arguing against that without parroting other people's opinions, so I'll just let it suffice to say we had different ideas of what constituted good drawing- which is a completely different argument.

On the other side of things, I had a conversation in real life with another writer. I asked her what sort of literary influences she had, and she responded by just saying that she tried to capture the way her favorite music made her feel. Which at the time, I took to mean that she didn't read very much, and a dodge of the question, but to angle for that sort of transendence is altogether admirable. I've sinced learned that she mostly writes music criticism and features, so it's not quite the same thing, but still.

This post doesn't quite work. It exists largely because I am putting off writing a post about Taiyo Matsumoto's Tekkon Kinkreet. I feel obligated to do it at some point because comics bloggers started linking to me, so I should up the comics-content accordingly, but I don't want this to be about comics exclusively, or predominantly, and actually I don't even read enough for this to be updated regularly were that to become the case. I think my goal is to try to talk about all sorts of different artistic mediums, like it's all some sort of vague toolkit, for people trying to take one medium and bend it towards being like another, to achieve some sense of transcendence. The only issue is talking about everything like that, angling towards transcendence without a really emphatic focus, will probably end up with a lot of kind of vague and inarticulate writing. (My Tekkon Kinkreet review, for instance, will be focused on the drawing, but I am without the aid of a scanner to actually make my points lucid.)

So, okay, let's talk about Steven Millhauser. Which I've done before. Bill Boichtel, proprietor of a comics store in Pittsburgh, said that "In the literature, film and-- perhaps especially-- the comics of the last few decades, we can’t help but notice faint hints of flavor, subtle aromas, and distant echoes which seem, now, after becoming familiar with it, to have somehow emanated from [Edwin Mullhouse]." (He also recommended another book of prose I'm reading right now.) I can only vaguely understand where he's coming from with that, but it's still more sensible than this quote, from I think The Washington Post, that shows up on a lot of his books, saying that his writing doesn't "just aspire to the condition of music, but actually achieves it," which is completely insane for all but the most synaesthetic of us. That said, I kind of think Millhauser's stuff works like visual art- Partly because of the way he talks about art, but mainly due to how the nature of the ideas of fantastic world building that form the basis for the majority of his stories would make sense worked out in an installation context.

The Hotel Chevalier short that shows before The Darjeeling Limited is interesting in that it doesn't show a lot of what is typically associated with Wes Anderson's style, the things that people are criticizing as tics. It's not crazy art-directed, it's not really all that quirky, etc. It could be said to signal a new direction, if anyone thought he was going to go that way, but I don't think anyone thinks he is, because that's a terrible direction, and Hotel Chevalier really isn't very good. It's important for context later on in The Darjeeling Limited.

Matthew Perpetua said the smartest things about The Darjeeling Limited, or at least the things that I was thinking about: Hey, here's a movie about rich kids, because Anderson's art-direction-driven style makes the most sense in a movie about rich kids, which I have no problem with, and also that's what the Coppola family members who cowrote the script know. Although, it's also worth noting that the movie doesn't have enough Bill Murray in it: The best scenes have Bill Murray in them. There's two of them. Oh, that first scene, with moving cameras? That's an interesting way that Anderson's style could evolve in a positive way. So nice and brisk coming out of the claustrophobia of Hotel Chevalier, shaking off its boredom.

I also liked the way the soundtrack was largely pre-existing Indian music. That showed signs of growth, although it was held back by the use of that song Jason Schwartzman plays on his iPod (it gets heard TWICE in Hotel Chevalier, right? At least!) (and in terms of art direction- eek, an iPod? The Royal Tenenbaums had things like electric tie racks) which brings us back to the world of expected Wes Anderson soundtrack choice music.

I did like the "I like how mean you are" bit at the end of the movie, which does require the setup in the short, making the short necessary. Also, the very presence of the short preceding the feature signals an interesting artistic choice/possible new direction. Certainly, these are minor deviations, but I still think they're valid.

I still think The Life Aquatic was better, and I think it's unfair to compare it to anything before The Royal Tenenbaums. Is it the weakest? Yeah, probably, but who cares, that's not the point. It's comparable to Lost In Translation in some of the themes it deals with, and it's way better than that, and isn't what really counts in art the strength in the way in which things are articulated, rather than how something fits into an oeuvre?

The answer is yes, but I don't think I have anything to say about the themes in question. Nor does any other movie critic in America, besides that Fluxblog piece I linked to, and that piece gets distracted, so there we are. The Darjeeling Limited is a thing that exists, and has its pleasures.

2007 Top Ten!

Technically, the year isn't over yet. But this is the point where the record industry pretty much stops putting out records, excepting things that are easy sells as Christmas gifts. Someone- John Darnielle?- Postulated that every record released after the last week in November is made by Queen. There's also the new Wu-Tang, Ghostface, and maybe the new Nas record with the controversial title. Feel free to post it in the comments thread. With an exclamation point. Just make it seem like it's directed at me. I didn't hear enough rap records this year.

This is really just an excuse to talk about music, the way we relate to music, etc. Oh, and to give you points of comparison when actual influential music magazines and websites start posting stuff. There are certainly things that came out this year that I haven't heard yet that I might really like. But it's either a top ten post or just a random post about that new Magik Markers record.

Without further hullaballoo:
1. Panda Bear - Person Pitch
2. Dan Deacon - Spiderman Of The Rings

I'm not sure I like that order, actually. I feel like Person Pitch is the more obvious choice, which is why it's at number one. It's the more "mature" album, even though the lyrics are super-simplistic and positive. Dan Deacon tells people at shows to imagine they're in their childhood den having a pizza party: His music is actually consciously childlike. Because of that, there's still more teenage energy. In some ways, they're the same record. The Dan Deacon record is overstuffed, bursting at the seams with so much energy. Woooody Woodpecker beats Comfy In Nautica as an opener, but Bros beats out Wham City as a third track epic.

I kind of want to give it to Dan Deacon, actually. This is due in one part to my contrarian streak- I think in 2004 my stance for awhile was that Girl Talk's Unstoppable was the album of the year, rather than Animal Collective's Sung Tongs- and kind of a tribute to the kind of year I had. Not the entirety of the year, but the fun part, the first half, was pretty Dan Deacon-ish. The fact that it's a record people might be writing off as a novelty record makes me even more behind it. Also, I used "Big Milk" in a movie I made. I don't know, last year I said the best album of the year was Paper Rad's Trash Talking DVD. These are my biases: Nerds rummaging through the cultural garbage, making jokes all the while, and somehow ending up with something moving.

The best thing I read about Person Pitch this year was on Stylus's top fifty list blurb.

But yes, switch those, actually, to note my contrarianism.

3. Marnie Stern - In Advance Of The Broken Arm

When Marnie Stern came to town, she ended up opening for BARR, which threw me for a loop I didn't expect. I told people to come and ended up in the restaurant talking while she played at the back of the bar. I'd only heard a chunk of her album then, a few mp3s, and wasn't even sold enough to buy a copy off her- I figured the show would kick my ass and convince me if the record was worth a purchase or not, but then I didn't hear the songs. Hey everybody, I'm an idiot.

But let's move past that, because these songs are amazing. The most recent time, I was actually listening for rhythms, moments where the drums and the riffs actually synch up to achieve what is normally associated with rock music. It didn't happen so much. Everything is falling down the stairs, or flying around your head. It's all over the place. It's got tornado powers, summoning the wind. It's all achieved through labor. Marnie Stern plays the shit out of the guitar, all cooped up in her room. Totally committed to the music. All of the songs are about art making, specifically, the putting a lot of work into such things. "My fingers burn, the skin is peeling off. This is my Thunder Road, this is my Marquee Moon, this is my Orthrelm In Tune, this is my love for you." That is a lyric that will die on the fucking screen, but ohhhhh dude. "Thunder Road" sounds like "Thought For Food," The Books record. Anthems for art-making: "I've been off the radar way too long!" "I'm almost an island, but not quite yet." The whole album is named after a DuChamp piece. Oh, and after a shitload of pop songs played from a whirlwind, the last track utilizes these spoken-word/performance elements that just nail me right where I stand: "I will paint you a picture that's inside my head, but first I must carve out a place." Sweet jesus. I think that Marnie Stern could make another record, not about art-making, and it might be able to actually communicate its depth to a larger group of people. I made some movies this year, and listened to a lot of Marnie Stern. I'm not really making anything anymore, but songs like "Put All Your Eggs In One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!" are still totally awesome even when the title isn't the slogan you're living your life by.

4. Electrelane - No Shouts, No Calls

Most of the songs kind of blur in my head. Krautrock rhythms, with girls singing. It's just a great aesthetic. I remember writing, in an e-mail to someone, that I wanted to make a movie with the tone of this record. Looking back on it now, it's kind of vague what I meant. To take a guess, I imagine I'll mean the rhythm of it, the kind of cool yet danceable beat, vaguely detached, but in a dreamy way, but with this undercurrent overtone of actual human emotion and longing. This was in the springtime that I wrote this, this is a springtime record. Flowers blooming, skin showing, wind blowing. I guess this band is now broken up a little. This is them nailing an aesthetic, after some instrumental records that weren't so good, really kicking ass on pop songs.

(I think they had a record with vocals, all sung in French, which is lame in as much as I don't think French is their native language, so it's vaguely an affectation. The straightforwardness is what I'm responding to here.) It's not a perfect album, it's just a really great aesthetic- Which, by the way, is what I think is going to define the music of the decade: The most exciting bands to me aren't the ones doing the best songs, but they're the ones putting on the best live shows. This would be bands like Lightning Bolt and Deerhoof, "favorite bands" whose albums aren't going to be the favorite of the year, due to something about them that makes their work all blur together. Maybe I just think of those as favorite bands because I am seeing bands live now, as opposed to the bands that existed during the nineties, when I was younger. Wow, that's a hell of digression. Especially since that record with vocals, The Power Out, I only heard once, at a party, and I mostly just remember liking it.)

5. Boris With Michio Kurihara- Rainbow

Wow, Boris were really great when I saw them live. I don't know. This record's really good. I listened to it a lot, especially towards the beginning of the year, when I first became aware of its existence. I like the way the guitar solos just kind of split through the songs like lightning. I like that it's metal largely in the ridiculousness of the vocal performance. I think it's a lot better than last year's Pink, because it's not so monolithic/monochromatic.

6. Magik Markers - Boss

I saw Magik Markers wrap up their set opening for Sonic Youth in 2005. I think they sucked at the time. I remember Elisa yelling at the crowd "fucking do something!" shortly after I'd walked in. This is their first "actual" record, after a bunch of CD-Rs and assorted Bull-Tongue-submitted detritus, with "actual" songs, and being recorded in a studio, and... I like it a lot. The thing thrown at noise musicians- that anyone can do it- isn't necessarily untrue. This album has actual songs, but still is kind of "anyone can do it." But the only other people I can think of who actually did it is Sonic Youth on Confusion Is Sex. Songs are moods, fast or slow, different effects pedals, different vocal melodies or approaches, and they switch up, and they're well-recorded and then well-chosen for their order: Alternate rockers with ballads, determined by how fast the instrumentalists are moving their hands. The justification I read for them making this record was their realization that they could do better songs than other people. They were right. Anyone could make this record with the right point of view, the same point of view that leads to confrontational noise shows and the realization that you're smarter than other people. This is better than that Thurston Moore solo record, which was in turn better than any Sonic Youth record since Murray Street. Killing your idols is fun, and made easy when they decide to record your album and then release it.

7. Liars - Liars

This could probably beat out the last two records. Not unlike Magik Markers, this is a band tightening up to make pop songs, only they were already further along than the provocation of noise shows. I like the fact that Plaster Casts Of Everything starts out kind of bad and then transcends itself. I like that Houseclouds sounds like early nineties Britpop, specifically Blur. I like that the third song then sounds like They Were Wrong So We Drowned b-sides, only not shitty. I like that when it comes into focus again it sounds like Jesus And Mary Chain. I like that my friend Alex tried to get my friend Evan to listen to it by saying it sounded like sixties garage rock, and then when I asked him about it later he admitted he was basically lying. It sounds like sixties garage rock only in relation to the rest of the Liars catalog, and that if you had synaesthesia its colors would be red with purple flashes like The Creation once claimed to be. But maybe I only think that because those are the colors of the cover to Strawberry Jam, which this is better than.

8. Wooden Wand - James And The Quiet

The cover of this album is a photo taken at a friend's house in Olympia, at a show I was at. This wouldn't be worth mentioning if this weren't a folk record. Because it's a folk record, it seems strangely appropriate. It's the best "straightforward" Wooden Wand album so far, whereas The Flood was their best jammy record. I listened to this a lot. I don't know what to say about it, besides what I wrote about it a few months ago. The runner-up folk record would be the Nina Nastasia/Jim White collaboration.

9. Eric Copeland - Hermaphrodite

Some might like the Black Dice singles compilation more. This is another record I wrote about, if I recall. I've been talking about it to people, I know. Insisting that it was the noise record of the year, and then telling someone that even though the album art might be creepy, the actual vibe of the record is sunshiney. It brings to mind world music, and walking the streets of unfamiliar foreign lands. The live show, with its ridiculous live volume, still had rhythms, although I don't think anyone in the audience was interested in hearing them: The high volume and the setting sort of stripped the sunshine away. Still, it recast this music in a different context, and it was amazing. The runner-up noise record would be Black Dice's Load Blown, yes.

10. Menomena- Friend And Foe.

This could be switched out for Strawberry Jam, certainly. I liked it a lot when I first heard it, and then I found out that what I had downloaded was not the actual tracklist, and that the actual tracklist doesn't flow as well. I also found out that the tracklist I was listening to had a track missing that I didn't add into iTunes. That song's not bad. None of these songs are bad. Another record I already talked about when I first heard it.

No runners-up! I've been writing about music all year, and don't need to list the things I liked again.