New Year memo

Happy new year to everyone. I hope you have had a good year and the best to everyone for 2013. I've had a decent year—the job creators were more kind to me than they have been in some time, which leads me to conclude, hopefully, that the economy must be improving (in spite of the best efforts of some of those same job creators to hold their breath for four years until they turn blue). Let's hope it keeps improving! We need the work! On the other hand, I also hope I can maintain or even ramp up the blog posting schedule I've been keeping most days of most weeks. Honestly, I look at the output of some of my favorite blogs, such as Antagony & Ecstasy, Lost in the Movies, or The Sheila Variations, and feel feeble in comparison. But I'm doing the best I can!

FYI, what's ahead: I am about done with countdown projects—really. Once the Facebook 50 is over, which happens this month, that's it. Next month, on Tuesdays, I will have results of a bracket-style reviewers tourney I participated in last summer. After that, I plan to revisit some of the albums I wrote about (and once made available as downloads) in the earliest incarnation of this blog, and give them more extensive write-ups, inasmuch as anything I do around here can be considered extensive. These will be favorite or "great" albums.

That earlier incarnation of this blog, by the way, the vaguely disreputable 2006-2007 mp3 blog portion you know if you have ever inspected the archives, now amounts, by my calculation, to only about 20% of the total posts, having published my 1,000th post this past month. So, with nearly 80% of the whole thing now arguably legitimate (with or without scare quotes), and because I get the sense that people don't always like people who use pseudonyms on the Internet, I have decided to make a clean break and start publishing under my real name (with or without scare quotes), which is Jeff Pike. For the record, I still like and will still probably use the alias JPK to comment in many places. Just so you know.

More faskinatin' data about this blog: In approximately May 2010, about five months after my two-year hiatus ended, Google started providing statistics on site traffic. I am reproducing the current list of this blog's top 10 most viewed pages, mostly because it is so weird. The runaway winner, better than tripling the #2, is a review of a horror movie that mentions the name of a starlet. Similarly, I'm convinced the Dolly Parton song does so well because I had the wisdom to include the word "boob" in the write-up. Anyway, here, for your edification, delight, and conjectures about the obvious, are my best-known pages (with total pageviews as of Dec. 31, 2012, in parentheses).
1. The Ring (2002), Oct. 1, 2010 (18,083)
2. 21. Eminem, "Kim" (2000), Nov. 23, 2011 (5,955)
3. 32. Dolly Parton, "Down From Dover" (1970), Nov. 2, 2011 (4,918)
4. "Billie Jean" (1983), Jan. 17, 2011 (4,874)
5. The Godfather: Part II (1974), April 1, 2011 (4,493)
6. Led Zeppelin IV (1971), Sept. 10, 2011 (2,895)
7. Led Zeppelin II (1969), Sept. 3, 2011 (2,454)
8. Ghost World (2001), June 4, 2010 (2,436)
9. 18. Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (1980), Nov. 29, 2011 (2,190)
10. 77. Brian Eno, "Third Uncle" (1974), June 6, 2011 (2,043)

But all that is the past. As for the future, I have plans, I have plans: Fridays to continue on movies, Saturdays on albums, Sundays on books, Wednesdays on songs—all, as ever, as stamina allows. Mondays I have been trying to catch up with new(er) albums and movies, including a monthly rundown post on movies and TV I've been watching, and I plan to keep that up. On Thursdays, a project that honors the numbers 13, 26, and 52 with a consideration of the letters of the alphabet. And, later in the year, I am thinking of series more focused on filmmakers or other categories of movies, probably starting with Robert Altman. Other possibilities on my short list include Joe Dante and Gregory La Cava.

Last, I am going to take my sweet time this year with the year-end assessments in movies for 2012. So look for that down the line, probably March time frame. In the meanwhile I can share the following critical lists for you—
Favorite movies first seen in 2012: The Apu Trilogy; Days and Nights in the Forest; The Double Life of Veronique; The Fast Runner; The Hurt Locker; The Lord of the Rings; M. Hulot's Holiday; Paris, Texas; A Scene at the Sea; Wendy and Lucy
Favorite movies seen again in 2012: Alien, Broadway Danny Rose, Enter the Void, Goodfellas, In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Dr., Pontypool, The Triplets of Belleville, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Yi Yi

Also, right, your own responsibilities in this overarching blog project. Please leave a comment once in a while. I appreciate knowing people have been here and read things and had a thought. I am notified of every comment, even on the oldest posts, so no one is ever lost in any shuffle. Comments absolutely tend to make my day, even the critical or challenging ones. So pretty please, with sugar on top, do what you have to to overcome the inertia now and then. You'll feel better, I'll feel better, we'll all feel better. OK, out. Thank you for your comments, visits, presence. Hope you all have a great year, from JEFF PIKE.