New Year memo

Happy Unbearable New Year to those who do or don’t celebrate, or even merely soldier on in ghastly times. How did we get here? We have our theories. Things will get better, but they may get worse before that unfortunately. I know it’s not much but it’s all I’ve got. And I used to complain about Bush/Cheney. In further news, I’m sorry to note that a very good friend of the blog, Steven Rubio—who commented here as “Mon-sewer Paul Regret”—passed from this sphere last March. He has been sorely missed since and will be for some time, perhaps all of the rest of mine. In addition, a facebook friend, a high school chum who did all the heavy lifting of staying in touch, Bob Rosberg, passed in October. I always loved hearing from him. He had lived in St. Petersburg since the ‘90s and was an excellent photographer. In perhaps slightly happier milestone news, this blog passed 3,000 posts this past year. I shudder to think how long it will take to get to 4,000 (and to the ultimate goal of 257 more after that). I may never, but of course that’s the way things go around here. We know the rules. We’re doing the best we can and that’s all we can ask. Well, I mean, we could ask for a reasonable and judicious US Supreme Court and a lot more constitutional rule of law but at least maybe we’re more aware of that than a year ago? At long last? So to speak. The schedule for the coming year is the same as it ever was. Sundays are for writeups about books and stories. Mondays are for newer movies. Wednesdays this year will feature song writeups. Thursdays as always are for horror short stories. Fridays are for classic movies, and Saturdays are album reviews. That is all. Proceed with caution.

Lists:

Woody Allen (dedicated to his appearances in the Epstein files, which further cement his reputation for extremely poor judgment over the years, and noting that my one-time long-time #1 or #2, Manhattan, is out because I just can’t anymore)
1. Love and Death (1975)
2. Annie Hall (1977)
3. Radio Days (1987)
4. Another Woman (1988)
5. What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
6. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
7. Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Stanley Kubrick
1. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
2. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
4. Barry Lyndon (1975)
5. The Killing (1956)
6. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001; a Kubrick project seen through by Steven Spielberg)
7. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

David Lynch
1. Twin Peaks (1989-2017; the franchise at large, including all of seasons 1-3 and Fire Walk With Me)
2. Eraserhead (1977)
3. The Elephant Man (1980)
4. The Straight Story (1999)
5. Blue Velvet (1986)
6. Mulholland Dr. (2001)

New Year memo

Happy new year to everyone except Donald Trump and MAGAs although it may be a happy new year for them despite anything I say. Thanks, voters! It’s hard to know what to say. The less said the better maybe, but watching will be more critical than ever. I seriously doubt grocery prices return to 2019 levels as promised, for example. Another devastating pandemic is more likely at this point. But I’m over here, keeping my little blog, cold comfort perhaps, too often feeling like embers of boomer view flaring up in a random breeze. I’m facing retirement this year so we’ll see how that goes. I’m not planning much different for the blog in 2025. I liked doing a couple of albums a month last year so much I’m going to try to keep it up, albeit with no countdown involved. That’s on Saturdays. Sundays are books and (increasingly, it seems) stories. Last Sundays I’m surveying the short fiction published in book form by J.D. Salinger, which is amazingly meager, only nine stories and four novellas (plus one novel, The Catcher in the Rye). I saw a 2013 documentary this year on Salinger, who died in 2010. The doc and people in a position to know (one would think) were then promising a handful or so of books of posthumous material, including a memoir of his unusually harrowing World War II experience, more Glass family stories, and other tantalizing stuff. WHERE ARE THEY? That’s my only question. Mondays are for recent movies, Thursdays for horror stories, and Fridays for classic movies of various repute. Critics like the darnedest things and so does the mass audience. Last, for your list-consuming pleasure, my list of Beatles albums ranked. YMMV—even your sense of what is and is not a Beatles album. Stay safe out there, folks.

Beatles albums ranked
UK editions, except as noted. The Past Masters collections, released in 1988, gather material not released on Beatles albums.

1. Rubber Soul (US, 1965)
2. Help! (1965)
3. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
4. Abbey Road (1969)
5. Past Masters, Vol. 2 (1965-1970)
6. Magical Mystery Tour (US, 1967)
7. Revolver (1966)
8. Past Masters, Vol. 1 (1962-1965)
9. Beatles for Sale (1964)
10. Please Please Me (1963)
11. With the Beatles (1963)
12. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
13. The Beatles (“White Album,” 1968)
14. Let It Be (1970)
15. Yellow Submarine (1969)

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)

New Year memo

Happy new year everybody, it’s that time of year again when we have to remember to use a new number from now on. I know you people are out there dating things. Get it right. Traditionally, for this New Year post, I put up pictures of my cats—Sam (gray) and Golly Gee (tuxedo)—one at a time in alternating years. That’s Golly over there contemplating light. The late Esme, Annabelle, and Charlie also made appearances likewise. But this year (with my first smartphone!) I got a good picture of Sam and Golly, actually together (below). So it’s been a big cat year and smartphone year too, among other things. As for blog stuff, it feels like I have been slowly falling behind in my reading (and a current slump is not helping anything) so I may be missing some Sunday book reviews here and there this year and/or there may be more stories. I looked up one day and suddenly realized how short-story-intensive this blog has morphed into being over the years—horror stories, for example, will continue on Thursdays. I’m also going to spend another year, on the last Sundays of every month, on a decade-by-decade tour of horror stories, this year starting in the 2020s and finishing in the 1910s. Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of it—next year (‘24) I plan to use those last Sundays to focus on Hemingway stories. I will still be doing at least one album per month (on Saturdays), but albums are no longer the main focus they started out being here. Maybe streaming did it to me. I have so successfully replicated the programming styles of radio between 1965 and 1981 that shuffling one playlist with songs going in and out is mostly the way I do it now. My heart is in those quarterly Top 40 installments, which will continue, Napster willing. What else? Looking forward to the shakeup the Sight & Sound poll will have on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? lists. I thought that poll landing on Jeanne Dielman as the greatest movie ever made was brilliant (inadvertently, of course, by way of statistical calculations that merely suggest a kind of consensus) and I was sorry to see people I want to admire like Paul Schrader getting grumpy about it. Everyone, please stop using the word “woke” immediately. I promise that’s the last time I will ever use it myself. Anyway, TSPDT classic movies and 21st-century picks will continue to dominate the longer Friday reviews. Monday reviews became a little problematic as the pandemic proceeded. They’re supposed to be new movies but have turned more into whatever is around on streaming that’s both affordable ($6 top price, preferably free) and interesting to me, however fleeting. I’m also in a little bit of a slump about watching movies now—it’s harder to finish many of them. I lose interest and drift away. I’m hoping to brave theaters again circa April and may get back to that “new” mode then. OK, yeah, so I think that covers all the days of the week that I publish. All the best to all for a happy new year!

New Year memo

Well, so happy new year once again to everyone. Let's hope it's a good one and you are evading the coronavirus with all due diligence. We've had another year of it and looks like at least another one still. Fingers crossed. I maintain a cautious age-appropriate lifestyle, staying in a lot except for grocery expeditions and walks a few times a week. But that's just me. It might not be so bad to get it, but I'd rather not, because it could be very bad, plus I wouldn't like to pass it on to anyone else. Also, "natural immunity" is overrated. Pro tip: when you're busy doing your own research, don't listen to crackpots.

I feel fortunate this year because I was not only able to keep this blog going at a decent clip but also wrote a handful or so of short stories, two of which made it into (digital) print. I hope to keep that going this year.

Other topics, themes, and whatnot in the schedule: I'm taking a hiatus from the Movie of the Year project, due to a slight case of burnout. I've been at it one way or another for years and may get back to it, but for now I've got the years 1935 to 2016 basically covered and I'm calling it good. As always, Mondays are for new movies (or increasingly streaming options), Thursdays for horror stories, Fridays for classic movies, Saturdays for albums, and Sundays for books, stories, and other things I read.

I always feel obliged to include a list or lists in the New Year memo. I have lately fallen into a booktuber rabbit hole on YouTube, so with no further apologies here are my favorites at the moment:

1. * emmie *
2. BooksandLala
3. nicole fegan (thanx for the Mariners doc tip!)
4. rincey reads
5. Vicky's Book Nook
6. Books and Things
7. Always Doing
8. Supposedly Fun
9. Leaf by Leaf
10. Luminous Libro

New Year memo

Happy new year, everybody. I hope you have survived the ongoing disasters and are taking all due precautionary measures. Don't go out if you can help it. Wear a face mask when you do. Get the vaccination when you can. Avoid domestic terrorists. How the fuck did this happen—that is the question. We've never seen anything like it. It's been that kind of year—unprecedented at multiple levels. And, honestly, I don't anticipate 2021 being much better, except I'm hoping for a change in direction, from gradual worsening to gradual improvement. I'm hoping. There is still a lot we don't know about the coronavirus or American politics or racial justice or climate change or or or—somebody stop me. I always think about writing something long and personal for these New Year posts and then my mind goes blank when I sit down to them and they end up short. Maybe that's for the best! My two cats finally became buddies, more or less—a welcome development. Along about June or July I saw an open-ended question on social media somewhere, asking what we were most proud of ourselves for this past year. My first thought was "Kept blogging." There was always a temptation to give up on everything this year, and I struggled a lot with routines of things like exercise, housework, and shopping, but for better or worse I stuck with blogging, which makes me think I will probably keep it up this year as well and into the future. I also wrote a few short stories, but I'll let you know more about that if any of them ever see the light of day. Otherwise pretty much all as usual: book and story reviews on Sundays, albums on Saturdays, classic movies on Fridays, horror stories on Thursdays. Last Sundays this year will go to Raymond Carver. One notable change due to the pandemic is the movie reviews on Mondays, which started five years ago as an exercise to get me out and looking at new releases more. But there was no going out to movies most of this past year and, with the fate of movie theaters still unclear, not for the time being either (at least we don't have to think about Oscars for a while, which have meant less every year for at least 40 years). Streaming options have stepped in instead, and with them more TV shows. That will continue this year, including various catch-up business. I'm also thinking of a track-by-track review of the Pet Shop Boys' Very Relentless, my favorite album by them and one of my favorites of all time—probably a Wednesday project. Thanks for visiting, reading, leaving comments. It's always appreciated as much as you can know.

New Year memo

Happy new year to all etc. etc., hope everyone is doing well. This is your annual chatty update. That's my new cat Sam in the picture. Charlie, who holds the record for appearances in New Year memo pictures (four: 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2019) passed away last January 28. He was a great cat. More milestones for me this past year included reaching over 2,000 posts on this blog. In 10 more days, on January 11, I can mark 10 years of more or less continual blogging about music, books, movies, and this and that. Happy anniversary to me! The blog itself formally had its 13th anniversary in August, but for the first couple of years it was a notorious outlaw mp3 blog followed by a two-year break. I can't explain why I stayed with it after shifting emphases, but here we are just about 10 years and a few cats later, slogging and blogging on. I seriously doubt any of my original readers are still with me. I admit I had high hopes professionally when I buckled down to steady writing in January 2010. I have always been prone to the baseball novel fallacy of "if you build it they will come." Then I was a little disappointed to see blogging itself fade as merely a fad (about when I started in fact, which is typical) and then the wider chase for audience across such platforms as Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Medium, Patreon, and so forth. Now we are living in this brave new narrow constricted world of social media and I'm still on Google Blogger. Well, OK. Blogging always was weird with its forever falling backwards in time structures. It's not really possible to do linear excerpts of anything in multiple posts, for example, and series are awkward. But I settled on it and stayed with it because it was accommodating enough for the discontinuities of writing reviews of old things, which is all I've ever wanted to do. Speaking of shifting expectations, this past year probably saw the fewest album reviews ever from a blog once devoted exclusively to them. The blog was also down by overall number of posts, but I suspect the word count would be about the same. I've stretched on some of the pieces about horror stories. But I don't want to lose track of albums, so I'm committing to one a month this year, possibly making them longer pieces as I've played with previously (see the Great Albums tab). The other place I slipped in the past year was new movie releases. To be honest, there is just less I want to see all the time in the multiplexes that are convenient to me. Because it’s now officially the 2020s I'm going to let TV productions and series seasons stand in there as well (even though I still think of it as the "movie out" category). I still intend to get to The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, for example, two movies I missed this year (among a multitude) for good reasons and bad. But I'm also going to peek in at some of these ongoing greatest-ever TV series forever cropping up in our hallowed golden age of peak TV. Reviews of books, horror stories, and classic movies will keep coming as usual. My blue sky goals here include 4,257 posts and all 1,000 movies on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? So I'm letting you in on the fact I'm not even halfway there yet. Here's to the next decade come what may.

New Year memo

Happy new year to all. Thanks as always for being part of this brave experiment. I start these annual messages with the intention to say something uniquely insightful, or at least witty, but soon retire behind small talk about the weather, scheduling plans for the coming year, and an odd list of movies. This year will be no different. It's been too rainy and wet so far and looks like it's going to be that kind of winter. I might blog a little less in the coming year—sometimes I feel my stamina flagging—but the general approach will remain Sundays for books, Mondays for newer movies, Thursdays for stories, Fridays for older movies, and Saturdays for albums. All best to everyone in the coming year!

Here are 20 great movies I saw in 2018:

1. I, Tonya (2017)
2. Lean on Pete (2017)
3. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
4. Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
5. First Reformed (2017)
6. Faces Places (2017)
7. Eighth Grade (2018)
8. RBG (2018)
9. Venom (2018)
10. Why We Fight (1942-1944)
11. Courage of Lassie (1946)
12. The Last House on the Left (2009)
13. It Follows (2014)
14. Morning for the Osone Family (1946)
15. This Happy Breed (1944)
16. Johnny in the Clouds (The Way to the Stars) (1945)
17. A Hen in the Wind (1948)
18. From This Day Forward (1946)
19. To Each His Own (1946)
20. The Corn Is Green (1945)

New Year memo

Happy new year, everyone. Or, for the cynical: Happy another year older and deeper in debt. Hope you are all alive well and doing fine. I stayed busy with blogging this past year (nearly broke 200 posts!), though I suppose much of it was about relief from and escape from the unpleasant realities going on around me. It's terrible to live powerlessly in a time of decaying empire led by a clown, but obviously things could be worse. In fact, I predict they're going to be. Brrr. It's cold out there now. Stay warm and help others stay warm too. We're all we've got in times like these.

I plan to continue blogging, for the relief and escape, for the pleasure of a purpose, and as always stamina allowing. No big changes ahead here. The short story project should finish by summer, and will likely be followed by a similar exercise with science fiction stories, which I somehow completely neglected in the first one (though I did get some choice horror titles in). That's Thursdays. Fridays continue movies, Saturdays albums, Sundays books, and Mondays more newish movies.

Here are 20 great movies I saw in 2017:

1. O.J.: Made in America (2016)
2. 20th Century Women (2016)
3. Get Out (2017)
4. American Honey (2016)
5. I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
6. Lady Bird (2017)
7. The Lego Batman Movie (2017)
8. Baby Driver (2017)
9. Colossal (2016)
10. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
11. Irreversible (2002)
12. Pitfall (1948)
13. Together (2000)
14. Spring Breakers (2012)
15. The Strangers (2008)
16. Morning Glory (1933)
17. Frank (2014)
18. Nymphomaniac, Vol. I (extended) (2013)
19. Gaslight (1944)
20. Christmas in July (1940)

And finally, the annual reminder to GO BUY MY BOOK.

New Year memo

Hey everybody. Well, shit. This past year. Where do you start? Bowie's death was sad but kind of sweet, all things considered, and at least it was natural enough. Prince was just sad. Real sad. And it went downhill from there, into a bad political campaign season and an even worse result we are going to have to figure out how to live with. It was just cruel to finish off with George Michael and Carrie Fisher, and then, Jesus Christ, Debbie Reynolds the next day. Too much death this year. I'm still picking up the pieces, more or less, with scattered thoughts about What To Do and what to expect, but it's not at all clear. For now, long term, I'm partial to the ideas in the Indivisible what-you-call-it. That make the most sense to me at the moment. We have to start thinking long-term and 50-state. I also think Obama's OFA site offers many good ways to direct energy right now, and I am hoping it will continue to do so. Things are likely to happen fast in the coming months and we're going to have to push back every way we can, even though our options are limited. It's heartbreaking to think about. The Supreme Court. Health care in America (my health care in America). The environment. The corruption and the horrors ahead. Or so it looks to me at the moment, on these dark nights. It's probably going to be bad, that's all. But we have to do what we can to resist an autocratic America that no one really wants.

On that note, Happy New Year and all best as always to readers. Really. Here's what's ahead on the blog, because I'm still planning, as always, to continue it until stamina do me part. The short story project started slow last year while I figured things out, and then in November I started to catch it up more. But it still has a ways to go—125 stories, as billed, and so far I've just covered 32.8% of that. So this year Thursdays and last Sundays will be short story celebrations, accompanied with probing questions. I'm going to poke away at albums, approximately every other Saturday. I'm going to keep reviewing new movies that I go out to a theater with noisy annoying people to see. Those will continue Mondays. And books on Sundays, movies on Fridays, some things never change.

Here are 16 movies I saw in 2016 that were extremely swell, in approximate descending order of swellness (subject to endless revision in the years ahead):

1. Frontière(s) (2007)
2. Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998)
3. Manchester By the Sea (2016)
4. Sing Street (2016)
5. The Handmaiden (2016)
6. Love & Friendship (2016)
7. Leonard Cohen: Live in London (2009)
8. Inside Out (2015)
9. Trainwreck (2015)
10. Sicario (2015)
11. Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
12. Deadpool (2016)
13. Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
14. Babel (2006)
15. Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Live (1974, 45 min.)
16. Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015)

Oh yeah, and GO BUY MY BOOK.

New Year memo

Happy new year once again to all of you, and best wishes as usual. Hope you had a good holiday season and are ready for the shit ahead in the coming year, as we all must be. Yes, I am talking about politics and Republicans, but not exclusively. I lost my cat Annabelle most unexpectedly this year—came home from an errand and found her dead, and she was only 6. You can't know when these things will happen. Then I got a wonderful new cat (GG, pictured), but with her came transition problems: fleas, and personality conflicts with my older cat Charlie. Same old shit, in other words, though I'm happy to have her and sorry to say goodbye to Annabelle with 2015. And now some notes about this blog (reminder: comments always welcome, particularly now when I understand Blogger makes it difficult to post them sometimes ... I appreciate the efforts at least as much as the comments ... thank you!).

A book: Among other things, I spent much of the last year putting together a collection of pieces, mostly from this blog but some older things as well. I will be making it available as an on-demand trade paperback and in e-book format too. More information on that to come. It was nice to take the break from blog writing, even though it was daunting to read through the archives. But I found I came out of it wanting more than ever to stay with the writing projects I keep burping up here. So look for more of the same in the coming year: Friday movies, and Sunday books, and I'm planning to return to albums on Saturdays, with reviews of more recent releases (as well as the odd oldies that distract me). And other things as they occur to me, or to you too, as I'm still entertaining requests.

New Year memo

Happy new year, everyone. Hope you are all well and doing fine. As you may have noticed, my blog productivity output is starting to show signs of the downward-sloping curve of so many before me. Blogging is cruel. After a few years of 200+ posts I have struggled to break 150 the past couple of years. This year I might not even make 100—that's the good news and the bad news (or vice versa). With another significant project in the offing, the only thing I'm willing to commit to are weekly book reviews on Sundays, not least because I have a sizable backlog of them and good habits these days about writing things up as I read them.

On the other hand, I think I might want to try requests, if anyone is so inclined. I believe I found one Facebook comment I can interpret as a request for an album review. And maybe some other comment somewhere for a movie? I'll see how they go. If there is any song, album, movie, book, or general topic you want to see me write about, don't hesitate to say in the comments here or any other way you have of contacting me (I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I subscribe to many newsletters, etc.). Your wish is my command, subject to my approval. To be realistic—well, to be realistic, I don't expect to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of requests here—but to set expectations, I can likely get to songs and albums more quickly than movies, and books could take a real long time. General topics are totally unpredictable—who requests those anyway? It's all totally unpredictable. It's an experiment!

All best to everyone in the coming year. Thanks for reading my blog. You know who you are and it is appreciated. Drop a line once in awhile.

New Year memo

Happy new year, everyone! Hope you are all well and doing fine. I had a lot of distractions this past year—good ones as well as not so good—and so the productivity on this blog was off some. Not sure it will get any better this year but hoping it won't get worse. For better or worse it's starting to become a habit.

The ongoing features / themes / whatnot of the Can't Explain blog (as always, stamina allowing):

• Great Albums: I've been hopping around the list but trying to stay near the top lately, and a little more focused on getting to them all. Last Tuesday of the month generally.
• Movie of the year: I took the past couple of months off, but I'm picking up with 1975 next and going monthly, still moving backwards in time. Movies on Fridays.
• Books on Sundays: Working through James Cain, Ian Frazier, Jim Thompson, and other things. Hoping for most Sundays this year.
• New! Exciting! Horror movies on Thursdays: Revisiting movies that scared me very badly. The plan is for monthly, last Thursdays.
• Songs on Wednesdays
• Other albums on Saturdays

Fun with numbers: Because my 10 most viewed pages has hardly budged since last year (the only change being that the recent Rust Never Sleeps review has bolted to #9 overall), I offer instead a list of the years for which I have written the most blog entries. I seem to have an unsurprising sweet spot between the years 1966 and 1982 but you will also see that 1979 and 1977 positively dominate. At one time, back in the early days, 1970 was neck and neck with 1977 for #1. My analysis: Most peculiar, mama.

Top 10 years I have written about
1.  1979 (40)
2.  1977 (36)
3.  1970 (29)
4.  1966 (28)
    1969 (28)
    1973 (28)
7.  1972 (27)
  1980 (27)
9.  1982 (25)
10.  1971 (24)
  1974 (24)

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.

New Year memo

Happy new year, everyone. It's been a decent year here and I hope the same's true for all of you too. Thanks as always for checking in and following along at "the Home of the Plangent Memoria"™—it appears there were more of you showing more interest than ever in this little blog over the past year, and it's much appreciated!

First: Good news! The prolonged 100 Other Songs countdown is wrapping up soon—I never thought it would extend into the new year, but what the hell, I took a train out of town for the holidays, so there you go. Between it and last year's 100 Hit Songs countdown I have found the write-ups to be fun and plan to continue them sans the countdown overlay into the future forever (or for the time being), probably on Wednesdays. For those of a mind, I also chip in a "song of the week" over at Balloon Juice, a sensible place for the U.S. citizens among us to go get on your political exasperation. My song picks usually appear on Fridays or Saturdays.

Planned new stuff for this year mostly involve movies. I spend a good deal of time with them these days, at home with the remote or out at the theaters predictably annoyed by fellow viewers, who chat, say "what was that?" and "what's going on now?" a lot, and check email on their smartphones. Furthermore, they all appear to be standing on my lawn. But I digress. I am starting a Movie of the Year feature on Fridays, looking at favorites by year, which will alternate every other week with the usual Friday movie reviews. It starts with 2011 and then I work my way back. This one's going to take awhile. More on that soon.

And too: Last year I was invited to participate with a couple of others on Facebook in a countdown of our 50 favorite films. I will reproduce my write-ups for that here on a weekly basis (so, yes, this will take awhile too) and will include invaluable thoughts on the enterprise of constructing and addressing a countdown too—exciting. The Facebook 50 '11 will also start later this month, as a regular feature for Tuesdays. More on that one soon too.

Thanks as always for stopping by, reading, and leaving comments—I love to get them. All the best to everyone for a great new year!

New Year memo

Happy new year, everyone. Hope your holiday season was a good one and for all the best in the coming year. Around here it's been a pretty good year.

Anyone following along is aware that my countdown of 100 Hit Songs is approaching its endgame. It's been a fun project, so much so that I'm now planning a sort of companion piece—100 Other Songs, drawn from the much larger pool of songs that did not make the U.S. Billboard Top 40, 1955-present. That will start in a few months, probably late April, as I gather up the titles and spend time massaging a list into shape. You can't know the pleasures of useless list-making unless you have indulged it yourself, and of course I highly recommend that you do so beginning immediately.

Another project for this upcoming year, actually already begun: Friday considerations of critical-consensus movies drawn from the massive major list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?—now with paragraphing, even! According to the website, that list is actually due for another updating shortly, but I don't anticipate major changes at the top and will continue with the first couple dozen or so, before going off on random choices again for awhile (as always, stamina allowing). But I think I will probably be returning to that list—at the very least it's a terrific programming guide, generally a good exercise, and a project that promises to go on forever (just under 20 years, by my calculations).

As always, on this blog comments are welcome and invited. Please don't be shy.

Last, here's a few little movies lists drawn up from the past year. Seeing movies is what seems to most reliably preoccupy me nowadays, for better or worse. I couldn't begin to address books of any type or TV shows (certainly beyond the ID channel) or even pop music of the year. And note that there are gaps aplenty anyway in the 2010 movies list as it is (iceberg tip of still not seen, for example: Inside Job, Carlos, Dogtooth, Splice, How to Train Your Dragon, Enter the Void, The Runaways, Greenberg, Mother, Tiny Furniture). Educate me further in the comments if you like.

Favorite movies of 2010: The Ghost Writer, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Social Network, Let Me In, Cyrus, The Kids Are All Right, Toy Story 3, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Despicable Me
 
Favorite movies first seen in 2010: Au hasard Balthazar; Tokyo Story; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; I'm Not There; The White Ribbon; Avatar; talhotblond; Death Proof; To Be or Not to Be; A Serious Man
 
Favorite movies seen again in 2010: Mulholland Dr., Jackie Brown, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fanny and Alexander, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Rachel Getting Married, Modern Times, M*A*S*H, Streetwise, Friends with Money