I love music. Honestly, I know people say they "love" things all the time, but I really mean it. Don't believe me? Well, take my average day for example:

I wake up at 6am to the sound of two alarm clocks (I really don't like getting up in the morning). The one next to my bed is an iHome tuned to The X, a decent alternative rock station in the 'burgh. The other is one of those good old black hotel alarm clocks, which plays the most annoying sound ever conceived by man.

After I come out of the shower and do my hair, I hit the space bar on my computer to turn iTunes onto whatever I was listening to the night before. I take a swig of whatever juice is in the fridge, turn off the tunes, and hop into my car. I have a 6-disc mp3 CD changer, and I always have about 50% of my music collection hiding in a container in the back seat.

As soon as I get to work, I put my 160GB iPod into it's dock, plug in my stereo headphones, and listen to music whilst I work the day away. A coworker often comes up to me and taps me on the shoulder to say, "Jay, how is the control tower treatin' you this morning?" I just smirk and politely turn off the tunes and have a nice chat.

My evenings home consist of a large percentage of time involved with iTunes and tweaking my collection (Right now, I'm listening to music of the 1970's...549 songs as of tonight). I now have gone through all 7500+ songs and ensure that the name of the song, Artist name, Album name, album art, and original year of release are accurate and updated. I also have everything rated on the not-so-good 5-star scale. My next hurdle is to fill in all the genre section in order to make some killer playlists...I haven't tried it yet, but Billy Joe sent me an email about Tune Up, a pretty cool looking program

I also like movies a lot (don't worry, I won't go into detail about that). Anyway, this evening, I caught the movie Almost Famous on one of my over-priced movie channels. It is the best of both worlds; its a movie, but it is immersed in the world of...music! Well, that got me to thinking about what makes a great movie, and more specifically, great movies dealing with music. Therefore, I decided to throw together a list of my top 5 music-themed movies (in no particular order):

• Almost Famous
• High Fidelity
• The Blues Brothers
• Empire Records
  
• This is Spinal Tap

Honorable Mention goes to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, School of Rock and Reign Over Me, which isn't exactly fitting with this category, but it is more musically related than some other movies. Then, we have all those great films with killer soundtracks. Such as: Trainspotting, Hackers, Breakin' (don't laugh), Footloose, Dazed and Confused, Ocean's Eleven, anything by John Hughes or Wes Anderson, etc.

I think Almost Famous hits home for me because when I was younger, I always wanted to be a journalist (as you can tell by my posts, I made a good decision by going into the sciences). I really would love nothing more than to go back in time and be a teenager during the mid-1960s through the early 1970's. To experience the origins of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Cream, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, some later Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Queen, any so many more...would just be unbelievable.

Today, I can say I love these acts because I've been able to sort through their entire collection in one sitting and pick out what I like. However, to experience it chronologically, it is so much different. Would I have liked all these artists from their first albums without knowing the great songs that might come later? Not everyone burst onto the scene with top-notch albums like Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut or Jimi's, "Are You Experienced".

So, I guess what this seemingly never-ending post is just supposed to say, I really liked the movie, and could relate to the character of William Miller easily. Most people would discredit my above list for not including the Beatles...but that is precisely why they aren't on there. This movie wasn't about some giant act (although they were mentioned a great deal throughout the movie); on the contrary, it was about an up and coming band, and how they were struggling to come into their own. William wasn't just along for the ride, he was actually a part of music history!

Note: I LOATHE Moulin Rouge, so I don't want to read any comments containing those words...no reason why, because I don't need one.

Labels: 1960's, 1970's, iTunes, JayBandit, movies, mp3s, music

Go see it.

That is all.

Labels: Brian, movies

I may just be imagining this, but it feels like way more people say "Have a good Fourth of July!" or the like in D.C. than in Illinois. Which makes intuitive sense, but it's kinda funny to experience.

In any case, here's hoping everybody out there in Urbanagora-land has a spectacular Independence Day weekend. If you get a chance, I highly recommend renting the HBO miniseries John Adams if you haven't seen it. Very, very good stuff, and one of the parts deals with the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence, so there's no better time to check it out.

Labels: Brian, culture, movies

Entertainment Weekly just recently came out with a list of the "New Classics," the top 100 movies made in the last 25 years. These kinds of things are very easy to criticize, but it's a pretty good list overall (Crash not being on it is a good indicator). They put Pulp Fiction at the top of the list, which is certainly not a choice I can argue with. My personal favorite 10 films off of their list, however, are:

10. Sideways (#84)
9. Rushmore (#22)
8. The Talented Mr. Ripley (#98)
7. Full Metal Jacket (#94)
6. Pulp Fiction (#1)
5. No Country for Old Men (#64)
4. The Silence of the Lambs (#8)
3. Brokeback Mountain (#31)
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (#38)
1. Fargo (#34)

There are a few films I can think of off the top of my head that are mysteriously not on EW's list at all, such as Being John Malkovitch, The Royal Tenenbaums, Ratatouille, Batman Begins, and Say Anything... Moreover, they put The Bourne Supremacy at #29, when clearly The Bourne Ultimatum was the superior Bourne movie, such that it probably would have crept into my personal top 10 (as would Batman Begins). I'm also unhappy Shrek (#25) and Pretty Woman (#37) made it on the list at all, nor do I think Titanic deserves to be #3. Quibbles aside, though, not too shabby, and at the very least creative.

Labels: Brian, movies

If you're ever in a bad mood for any reason, go out and rent the movie Once. It will solve all of life's problems for at least one hour and twenty-five minutes.

Labels: Brian, movies, music

Last night, the Urbanagora contributor commonly known as Augur and I went out to see Taxi to the Dark Side in the only theater in DC still showing it. Taxi is a documentary detailing the United States' treatment of those it detains in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, centered around the story of an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar who died while in US custody at Bagram Air Base.

The movie is produced by Alex Gibney, who competed against himself this year for the Best Documentary Academy Award, having produced both Taxi and the Iraq war documentary No End In Sight. Taxi ended up winning, and rightly so. No End is a terrific film that ably catalogs the many follies committed throughout the waging of the Iraq war, but it ultimately fails by leaving the viewer wondering whether the war was merely a failure of execution or a more fundamental failure of conception. (Incidentally, one of the experts interviewed for No End is Samantha Power, the Obama foreign policy adviser who recently had to resign the campaign after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster.")

Taxi suffers from no such muddled viewpoint. The movie is designed to outrage and disappoint its viewer, and in that goal it is successful, at least based on my reaction and the apparent reactions of the other theatergoers surrounding me. It is a scathing, brutal indictment of an administration that has both ignored high-level military experts and scapegoated low-level military personnel.

Gibney convincingly persuades us that Dilawar, the Afghani taxi driver, was the victim of a homicide at the hands of the American military, and further that he was probably innocent of any wrongdoing. But Dilawar's story serves mainly as a vehicle by which the filmmakers show that the universally condemned atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib were not the acts of "a few bad apples," but rather were the result of a widespread, deliberately vague policy coming from within the Bush administration.

Thinking back on the movie, several moments stand out in my memory: an interview of a British citizen held and abused in Guantanamo Bay without trial, Senator Carl Levin holding up documents released by the Department of Defense that had been redacted in their entirety, an FBI officer demonstrating how to conduct an interrogation that is both humane and effective. But of course what stands out the most are the shocking, sickening images of prisoner abuse - including, by the way, heart-rending footage of Senator John McCain as a young navy pilot held captive in Vietnam, choking back tears as he tries to tell his wife that he loves her. It is only too awful, then, to see Senator McCain try to subject this administration to the rules of civilized society and international law, only to eventually cave in to political pressure and allow the administration to interpret the rules as it sees fit.

Augur and I picked a good time to see this movie, on the same day that President Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited waterboarding, a technique in which restrained detainees are made to feel as if they are drowning. I heard that news before I went to see the movie and was saddened. After I saw the movie, I was downright ashamed.

Go see it, or if it's not showing in a theater near you, put it on your list of movies to rent on DVD. In a political season in which issues of the economy and foreign policy may fairly be debated, this movie stands as a useful reminder that some issues strike at the heart of our most deeply held values, and that we sacrifice those values at great risk to our security, our rule of law, and our souls.

Labels: Brian, foreign policy, jurisprudence, movies

The project's put up another great clip for download. I only wish that the space available for the dance moves had been larger. I plan on sending off my second batch of interview questions to Jeannie sometime in the next week or so. Until then, enjoy.

To my fellow Urbanagora posters, btw: I've received a number of complaints that the embedded videos that y'all've been posting is slowing the loading time for the page to a crawl for older machines. It might be a good idea if we all backed off on this and just posted links for a while to accomodate those who actually show up and read us on a regular basis.

Tom Trumpinski

Labels: future art, movies, Tet, zero-g

One of my favorite things about the end of the year is the slew of top 10 lists that come out in various media outlets. I always have a tendency to feel inspired to create top 10 lists of my own before I realize that I have not been anywhere near exposed enough to all of the various things I would be listing (i.e. movies and music). I mean, I might have seen 10 movies that came out this year, not all of which were good, and my familiarity with all or even a great deal of the albums of 2007 is just as limited. So it's sort of difficult to say what the ten best movies of the year were, for example, when I haven't seen a whole slew of movies that would probably have ended up on my list if I had seen them.

But I still like making lists. So, instead of creating some sort of definitive Top 10, I'm just going to list some stuff I liked a lot, roughly in the order of how much I liked them, but specifically noting some of the things I have not yet but would like to see/hear and which I suspect would have made it on my list if I had only took the time to see/hear them.

And, yes, I know hardly anybody who reads this blog cares what I think about these subjects and that this is pretty much just for my own enjoyment. But, I'd be more than happy to hear what movies, music, etc. you all enjoyed from the past year, so please share. Anyway, here are my...

Favorite Movies That I Have Seen So Far from 2007
1. No Country for Old Men
2. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
3. The Lives of Others
4. Into the Wild
5. The Bourne Ultimatum
6. Michael Clayton
7. Zodiac

Movies That If I Saw Them Would Stand a Decent Chance of Being Among My Favorites from 2007
1. There Will Be Blood
2. Juno
3. The Savages
4. Sweeney Todd
5. Once
6. Atonement
7. Gone Baby Gone
8. Persepolis
9. Charlie Wilson's War
10. Knocked Up

Favorite Albums That I Have Heard So Far from 2007
1. In Rainbows, Radiohead
2. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon
3. Wincing the Night Away, the Shins
4. The Reminder, Feist
5. Neon Bible, Arcade Fire
6. Night Falls Over Kortedala, Jens Lekman
7. Cross, Justice
8. Graduation, Kanye West
9. Boxer, the National
10. All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer
11. Blackout, Britney Spears
12. I'm Not There, Various Artists

Albums That If I Heard Them Would Stand a Decent Chance of Being Among My Favorites of 2007
1. Sound of Silver, LCD Soundsystem
2. Andorra, Caribou
3. For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver
4. The Flying Club Cup, Beirut
5. The Shepherd's Dog, Iron and Wine
6. Kala, M.I.A.
7. In Our Bedroom After the War, Stars
8. Challengers, the New Pornographers
9. The Con, Tegan and Sara
10. Back to Black, Amy Winehouse
11. Under the Blacklight, Rilo Kiley

Labels: Brian, entertainment, movies, music

I just received a very excited email from Jeannie Robinson. She and her dancer are definitely flying one week from today. She and her husband (Spider Robinson) and the production crew are headed for Las Vegas.

They have started a blog here in which Spider, who is a professional science-fiction writer, will be talking about their experiences.

On behalf of all of us here at Urbanagora, Jeannie, Godspeed. We're looking forward to hearing about it and seeing it on the big, big screen.

Tom

Labels: future art, movies, space

So I live down the street from the Uptown Theater in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. It's a great old single-screen theater with facilities and presentation that are probably the best I've ever seen (though the Moolah in St. Louis is up there too). I recently saw a screening of the final cut of Blade Runner at the Uptown and was very impressed, and I recently learned that it hosted the world premier of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. The point being that while I've only been living in DC for a few months, I've already grown rather affectionate toward this theater.

You can then imagine my disappointment when I learned that the Uptown is planning to rent out the theater to a virulently anti-gay evangelical megachurch. The McLean Bible Church wants to make the theater home to one of nine satellite "campuses" designed to create a "spiritual beltway" around Washington. The church's senior pastor, Lon Solomon, has said homosexuality is a "bridge to despair, confusion, loneliness, depression, promiscuity, guilt, self-hate, loathing and self-destruction, but Jesus Christ can set you free," and the church has an "Out of Darkness" ministry that offers treatment for various "forms of sexual brokenness," including "same-sex attraction."

Many of the residents of Cleveland Park have raised objections to the idea of their neighborhood becoming home to an extension of this church. The church needs a zoning variance in order to conduct its operations at the Uptown, which requires approval from the city's zoning board.

The neighborhood's Yahoo! group became host to much of the debate. One poster wrote, "I do not welcome any anti-gay or anti-lesbian group to the neighborhood. I will not tolerate hate groups." Another wrote that he opposes the church's "Hezbollah model toward establishing a theocracy."

One gay resident disagreed, writing that it is "positively un-American to try to use the zoning law to keep a religious institution out of the neighborhood because you personally detest its theology and social and political beliefs."

While the idea of the Uptown renting its space to this church makes me sad, I'm also uneasy about the idea of restricting it from doing so (it's hard to argue this isn't a First Amendment issue, right?). This is especially true since single-screen theaters like the Uptown have been struggling financially recently, and leasing to this church could help it stay in business and keep it from being "turned into a Walgreen's," as another gay resident of the neighborhood argued. I really love this theater, and if renting it out to hate-mongers keeps it from closing its doors, I feel like I have to say go for it, don't I?

It is, however, utterly moronic that churches like this get tax-exempt status. The senior pastor says things like, "Any political candidate that espouses gay rights, we have a responsibility to ensure that they never get into office. If they do, the consequences to this nation will be dire...It's a fight we dare not lose." Why religious organizations get tax-exempt status at all is beyond me, but this isn't even a religious organization, it's a political one (and likely a fairly powerful one at that).

Anyway. The whole thing makes me a little depressed. Maybe I should go see a movie.

Labels: Brian, free speech, movies, religion

My parents and I went to see the movie A Mighty Heart today, which tells the story of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and eventual murder in Pakistan five years ago. Don't have much to say about it, except that I highly recommend it. It reminded me of United 93 in the sense that its emotional impact comes through a startling sense of realism. Both movies are among the most terrifying I have ever seen. They also both use the subject of terrorism to effectively illuminate the best and the worst that humanity is capable of, leaving us with appropriately difficult questions about the state of our collective soul.

After we got home, my mom pointed me toward this negative review of the movie written by Asra Nomani, who appears as a character in the movie and who worked with Pearl at the Wall Street Journal and who rented a house in Karachi where Daniel and Mariane Pearl stayed when Daniel was kidnapped. Among her criticisms is that Daniel's character is barely to be seen in the movie at all, which is in its way true (though to the extent that he is shown, I believe his character is fleshed out quite well). It is difficult to argue with a woman who lived through the experience herself, but it seems to me she misses the point of the movie, which is not meant to be a tribute to Danny, or even one to Mariane, as much as one to the people, like Nomani herself, who worked together to do the best they could to bring Daniel home. Go see it if you get the chance.

Labels: Brian, movies, terrorism