New Year memo

Happy new year one and all, hope the holiday season treated you well, and all the best for the coming year! Meanwhile, here at the Can’t Explain offices, big things are brewing. Big, big things. —nah, just basically the usual. Well, on Saturdays, look for my first countdown in ages—the unquestioned 25 best psychedelic albums of all time. Note that this is not a list of “favorites” but a scientifically objective rundown of the finest, determined using the most carefully calibrated engineering principles and instruments. Sundays are for books and stories as usual. Last Sundays this year will feature early stories of Ernest Hemingway. I meant to do a broader overview of his whole career (and maybe even get to “The Old Man and the Sea”) but I ran out of time and only got through the first two collections. Some mighty good stuff there but already I was seeing way too much bullfighting. Cycling further through the days of the week, look for reviews of new movies on Monday and/or streaming selections because I was too lazy or uninterested to go out. Thursdays continue on horror short stories, focusing on the 1970s this year but also including stuff from before that, as I see fit. And Fridays are the good old classic movies, not all of which I like so much. This past year I traveled to Las Vegas and saw Cirque du Soleil’s Love, their riff on a slice of the Beatles catalog remixed by George Martin and son back in 2006. Yes, it only took me 17 years to get there but glad I did. Don’t miss it if you can. Among other things it inspired me to try the first list below of favorite Beatles songs (not all of which were in the show). No doubt this list would be different if I tried it again tomorrow. And for your further list-consuming pleasure, my Sight & Sound ballot if they had asked me to do one. Hopefully I make it another 10 years and can throw up another one for you then. Stay safe and warm everybody!

Top 10 Beatles songs
1. “A Day in the Life”
2. “Lady Madonna”
3. “You Won’t See Me”
4. “Help!”
5. “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You”
6. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”
7. “If I Fell”
8. “Rain”
9. “Back in the USSR”
10. “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”

“Imaginary” Sight & Sound ballot
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)