Today I thought of one of my favorite songwriters, Warren Zevon. I did a quick YouTube search and found a video of Zevon doing Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. If you've heard of Zevon, you're probably most familiar with either his hit Lawyers, Guns and Money or Werewolves of London. I like those too, but this has always been my favorite:

Labels: legends, music

Peter Suderman asks in response to the release of this new Death Cab for Cutie song: "Has Ben Gibbard sold out yet, or is he still cool? Have we arrived at the backlash to the backlash stage yet?...I kind of like the song, but I need to know whether my indie cred will suffer if I say so." I don't have much indie cred to begin with, but I'll weigh in and say that I think he's still cool.

You have to be patient with this song (as in, wait until about halfway into it for it to really get started, which is annoying), but it's fairly rewarding if you are.

Labels: Brian, culture, music

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

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've recently rediscovered an artist that I was first introduced to in a series of wonderful mix tapes. I wanted to lend your Wednesday morning a touch of beauty by sharing this song with you. She also does humorous and political songs. I'm planning on going to one of her upcoming concerts, and I'll likely post more on her later. For now, here is Cheryl Wheeler singing "Arrow."

Labels: Augur, music

Sometimes I think I was born 40 years too late. I spent the last hour watching black and white YouTube clips of great performers performing. I asked myself, who in the charts today has the potential to be timeless? Who could be a Bing Crosby, an Elvis Presley, or a Johnny Cash? It seems to me that our generation lacks giants. There is, no doubt, artistic genius today, and one would expect it to be even richer as it benefits from the inspiration of those who came before. I still can't think of a popular artist today that can overwhelm an audience with artistic genius. Need an example? Here is Ella Fitzgerald singing "How High the Moon."

Labels: Augur, legends, music

I stumbled across this video today of James Brown and Pavarotti after seeing news that the legendary tenor is in serious condition. Unfortunately, the two might be reuninted all too soon for a concert in the sky.



Also, as you ponder what his loss might mean to people throughout the world, here is Pavarotti performing Schubert's Ave Maria:

Labels: Augur, music

I love this Cat Steven's song. Even on particularly rough days listening to this reminds me how magical life is.

Labels: Augur, fun, Lightening up, music

This is pretty fantastic. Here we have a Bob Fosse routine that is bizarrely well synchronized to Unk's "Walk It Out."



And here is the same video with the song it was originally set to: a '60s go-go tune called "Mexican Breakfast" by Gwen Verdon.



Which is better? I report, you decide.

UPDATE: As Tom points out in the comments, I got this wrong. The dancer is Gwen Verdon, the song is composed by Pat Williams.

Labels: Brian, entertainment, music, video

Every now and then I discover a band I enjoy that a part of me dares to think Billy might enjoy too. I rarely summon up the courage to share these bands with him, however, out of fear that he will reject them in such a way that sends me into a tailspin of blind fury and leaves me wondering how I could ever be friends with such a lame, narrow-minded ass (no offense, Billy).
I'm going for it this time, though, and hopefully even if Billy refuses to enjoy it, some of you like it. It's a band called Bishop Allen, named after Bishop Allen Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where singer Justin Rice and guitarist Christian Rudder lived after college. It's warm pop rock with solid lyrics. Here's their main website, and here's their MySpace page, both of which have free samplings of their songs. They also have concert dates coming up soon in Chicago and elsewhere, in case anybody's interested.

Here are a few of my favorites:

"ClickClickClickClick" from The Broken String
"Rain" from The Broken String
"Things Are What You Make of Them" from Charm School

Labels: Brian, entertainment, music

Labels: art, Augur, friday fun, music

Strangemaps.com has produced the map below which analogizes the size of each state's GDP to a foreign country. People, more often liberals, deride the economy without proper perspective, "US GDP is projected to be $13.22 trillion in 2007, according to this source. That’s almost as much as the economies of the next four (Japan, Germany, China, UK) combined." Check out the original post for more details and tons of commentary. Click on the image to get a bigger view.


As a side note, Strangemaps has recently posted a map illustrating New Jersey as seen through Bruce Springsteen's lyrics. Bruce is my favorite, when I saw him perform at "Comiskey Park" he played for about 4 hours without stopping. Some new artists play for an hour . . . if you're lucky.

Labels: Billy Joe Mills, economics, music

3quarksdaily, one of my favorite new blogs, posts a piece by Justin Smith about Hipsterism and aging.

I post it here because, as Brian and I know quite well, several members of this blog have a sort of "distaste" for hipster culture, one in which it would seem that Brian and I dabble. This of course is largely in the sphere of music (Pitchfork) but also in the sphere of what we read online (compare Brian's link list to Billy's or Tet's) and in general as a sort of vaguely snobby ironic distaste for...everything, except Neutral Milk Hotel and Chuck Klosterman.

I was going to write a column while I worked for the Daily Illini about Klosterman and what it is that he represents and call it "Klosterphobia," but I realized that I was not ballsy enough to criticize Klosterman, and moreover no one really cares except hipsters, and they hate the DI. But Klosterman embodies this sort of pathetic irony, the generation before mine which lived High Fidelity and Clerks and had pretentious record collections and wanted to be John Cusack. And had an ironic love of mainstream sports. And failed with women, or if they succeeded, lost all prospects of ironic charm in the future. Klosterman, though, made a career of how snide he is and is known to write things like:

"Whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (Which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack."

I find that hilarious and charming, of course, as I do all of his books. But I vaguely hate myself for that, mostly because Klosterman represents every "self-aware," "self-loathing," "ironically better than you" older kind of guy who makes his living doing "cultural criticism," whatever that is.

Smith says on aging hipsters:

But what I am concerned about is my own generation, those who have worn “moustache rides” t-shirts for reasons several degrees removed from their original intent, and its prospects for aging well, which is to say its prospects for dying with grace and equanimity. At first glance, the fact that hipsters share irony with the West’s wisest condemned prisoner would seem to bode well for them. Yet Socratic irony and hipster irony could not be more different. Hipster irony has to do with taste, not truth, and it only makes sense relative to a certain context of commitments and preferences, while what Socratic irony strives for is a contemplative detachment from all partis pris. In an absolute sense, there is nothing more in Death Cab for Cutie or Arcade Fire that commands one’s earnest and straightforward appreciation than there is in Boxcar Willie, Juice Newton, or Perry Como. From a certain perspective, it is all garbage, and from another it is all fascinating. Hipsters still hope to draw a distinction between the genuinely good and the merely humorously good, by means of a bivalent logic in the end no more subtle than the ‘cool’/‘sucks’ dichotomy through which Beavis and Butthead filtered the world. An elderly ironist in contrast has had the time to watch enough cultural flotsam go by that he can no longer pretend that one instance of human productivity is intrinsically much more ridiculous than any other. Fully convinced of this truth, he might truly be prepared to die: he knows what to expect from the world, and so expects nothing more.

And that, I think, is the crux of it. Though I still marvel at the terror of Billy Joe Mills listening to and loudly reciting many relics of classic rock, at the end of the day when I scream lines from the Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas in the privacy of my own shower I am guilty of the same kind of taste-mongering. And neither mine nor Billy's is particularly ironic, and so..so much for being a hipster, I guess.

I think the reason I choose to side with the culture of holier-than-thou irony as opposed to straight-shooting, obvious likes and dislikes is that it's safer and more pleasing at the end of the day to be culturally passive aggressive. That way I like (and therefore understand, apparently) something very few people do, dress in all black and have thick glasses frames, and cherish the last bit of self esteem I have by leveraging my oddities against the largely normal.

But I guess the entire project of a someone who is a self-identified hipster-wannabe criticizing the (sub?)culture is a defeatist sort of endeavor.

(Addendum: hipsters clearly belong on facebook)

Labels: culture, hipsters, Lally, music, pop culture

I'm not usually one for this kind of sappiness, and maybe I'm just having an off day, but...well...this nearly made me burst into tears. Do I need therapy?

Labels: Brian, entertainment, music

The Westboro Baptist Church brings us a message we can all get behind: God hates the world.



I'm not sure I get the "You'll eat your children" part, but, hey, it's catchy.

Labels: Brian, entertainment, music, religion

Today I was listening to music while reading for class and a song came up that made me lose concentration for its entire 3 minutes and 55 second duration and for the next twenty minutes while I looked up the artist. This is going to sound like a cheezy plug, but I think Immortal Technique is definitely a bright spot in America's increasingly mainstreamed hip hop subculture. There's something refreshing about hearing hip hop go back to its political and socially critical roots. It's full of profanity and big words meshed together in such a way that can just hear the frustration of a guy who's had it hard and is largely self-educated expressing his view of the world around him. So this was my brief plug for a favorite underground political artist, anyone in Urbanagoraland have any other personal favorites?

Labels: Hanno, music

If you like music at all, then you will love this song: from a band called TigerCity. Just throwing it out there.

Update: music (for robots) took down their link to this song, as they normally do after a week or so, so it doesn't work any more, but you can still listen to TigerCity at their website.

Labels: Brian, entertainment, music

Jon Ozaksut, who has his own blog and occasionally comments rather insightfully on this one, is also a member of local band Probably Vampires, which produces fun, well-crafted indie pop songs. I bring it up because Probably Vampires will be appearing this Saturday at the Canopy Club. A mere five dollars, and there are other bands performing too. You can get a sampling of their music on their MySpace account. You should, you know, go and stuff.

Labels: Brian, entertainment, music

Billy and I like the idea of recurring features in this blog, much the way our friends at America vs. the World maintain international power rankings. That's why we started our respective respect rankings. Now I'm unleashing what will hopefully be another occasionally updated feature which Billy may or may not also take up: Bold Predictions. The title is pretty self-explanatory. It is, in a small way, inspired by this column Billy wrote at the end of this past semester, in which he made a number of randomly assorted predictions about the world, most of which I found absolutely ludicrous but still fun to think about. This is dangerous territory, and anybody partaking will probably be made a fool of more often than he is vindicated, but I'm just a ballsy guy I guess.

Prediction #1: Hillary Clinton will not run for President in 2008, or if she does, she will not win the nomination.

Who will? My money's on - wait for it - Barack Obama. Political figures only get so much time in the spotlight before they are picked apart by various social vultures: other politicians, the media, the blogosphere, the people. Obama's clock started ticking in July 2004 when he gave his famous DNC speech. If he waits until 2012 or 2016, he will have waited too long. This only applies if Obama has the political brilliance required to defy the conventional wisdom.

Prediction #2: John McCain will win his party's nomination for the presidency, but not the general election.

Following the same ticking clock logic as in Prediction #1, McCain's time has almost run out. He has been treated absurdly well by the media and has thus acquired a largely mythical reputation that outshines any politician in recent memory, and thus his time in the spotlight is probably longer than most, but by 2008 even his glorification period will have been extinguished. He will appear electable enough that Republicans will not be able to help but vote for him in the primary, but he will soon thereafter be discovered as the political phony he is once people get tired of worshipping him. Pitted against Obama, he will lose a very close contest at the end of a memorable and worthy campaign.

Prediction #3: US troops in Iraq will be diminished to a large degree if not withdrawn entirely during the year 2009.

I prefer to think they will be gone because they will no longer be needed, but even if they are, they will be removed for political reasons. Why not before 2008? Because the existence of troops in Iraq, so long as there is the current perception that things there are going to hell in a handbasket, will become more and more a political asset of the Democrats. Why actually remove troops from Iraq if they can use the presence of troops there to rail against Republicans and win seats in 2006 and the White House in 2008? Cynical? Perhaps. Smart politics? Certainly. (Ultimately good for both the US and Iraq? Probably.)

Prediction #4: The indie rock scene, as dominated by hipster culture, will be remembered and celebrated by future generations the same way classic rock, as dominated by hippie culture, is remembered and celebrated by our generation (or the same way the writings of the Beat Generation, as dominated by beatnik culture, is and was celebrated by subsequent generations).

Call me pretentious for liking indie rock all you want, but it is this subculture of American youth which will come to create its own great artwork and will say they found inspiration in the likes of the Postal Service, Sufjan Stevens, Bright Eyes, Radiohead, and all the rest. Just as those bands look back on Pink Floyd and the Beatles and Bob Dylan with awe and reverence, so too will future generations of music lovers look back on the indie rock scene of today (though, of course, that will all be celebrated alongside the groundbreaking hip hop that was spawned and developed in our lifetime).

Prediction #5: The great ideological struggle of our generation will not be the clash between secular liberals and religious conservatives, as it is today, but rather between libertarians and other small-government advocates and believers in a strong national government that provides in some way for social welfare.

The religious right is on its way out in this country: young Americans are largely rejecting the politics of hate, even conservative ones. The wedge issues of today may be gay marriage, abortion, and school prayer; but the wedge issues of tomorrow will be Social Security, health care, and public education. There will also be a rift between believers in a strong American presence around the globe and a more isolationist sect. These two dichotomies (libertarian-and-not, isolationist-and-not) won't perfectly overlap, but will instead provide interesting sects within each of the two main parties.

Labels: 2008, Brian, foreign policy, music, politics, role of government