Favorites, 2016

Back in the old days of the Notes, I used to write a lot more about music, movies, and books, and I would every so often post updated lists of my absolute favorites of things.  Not due to any pressing interest from the public, of course–mostly just because it’s fun for me, and also because having such a blog post can be quite handy during discussions online; I can just link someone to the entry to aid in a discussion of favorites.

Of course this is not to be confused with my annual “Favorite Music” list, where I detail my favorite music released in the previous calendar year; these lists detail my current all-time favorites, which are (like yours, of course) constantly changing.

Looking back at my entries, it appears as though I haven’t done a big posting of lists since 2012, so I’ll make this one fairly comprehensive.  All of these lists have changed since 2012–some very little, some quite dramatically:

My top ten favorite poets

10.  Jane Kenyon
9.   Robert Creeley
8.  William Carlos Williams
7.   Sylvia Plath
6.  Billy Collins
5.  Denise Levertov
4.  E.E. Cummings
3.  Philip Levine
2.  John Updike
1.  Philip Larkin

My top 10 favorite film directors

10.  Federico Fellini
9.  Sidney Lumet
8.  Alejandro Inarritu
7.  Christopher Nolan
6.  Paul Thomas Anderson
5.  Alfonso Cuaron
4.  Stanley Kubrick
3.  Werner Herzog
2.  Alfred Hitchcock
1.  Terrence Malick

My top ten bands

10. This Will Destroy You
9.  My Morning Jacket
8.  Godspeed You! Black Emperor
7.  Radiohead
6.  Seven Mary Three
5.  Hey Rosetta!
4.   The National
3.  Band of Horses
2.  Modest Mouse
1.  Arcade Fire

 

My top ten music solo artists

10.  Tracy Chapman
9.  Ray LaMontagne
8.  Father John Misty
7.  Leonard Cohen
6.  Jim James
5.  Nina Simone
4.  Willis Earl Beal
3.  Emily Wells
2.  Paul Simon
1.  Neil Young

My top ten favorite (non-documentary) movies

10.  Citizen Kane
9.  Night of the Hunter
8.  Fitzcarraldo
7.  Magnolia
6.  The Trouble with Harry
5.  Children of Men
4.  Where the Wild Things Are
3.  The Thin Red Line
2.  I’m Still Here
1.  The Tree of Life

My ten favorite novelists

10.  Malcolm Lowry
9.  John Steinbeck
8.  Isaac Asimov
7.  Ernest Hemingway
6. Oscar Wilde
5.  Kurt Vonnegut
4.  Mark Twain
3.  David Mitchell
2.  Don DeLillo
1.  Dave Eggers

My top twenty favorite books (any genre, fiction or nonfiction)

20.  “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole
19.  “Slade House” by David Mitchell
18.  “The Terror” by Dan Simmons
17.  “You Shall Know Our Velocity” by Dave Eggers
16.  “Point Omega” by Don DeLillo
15.  “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell
14.  “Fallen Founder” by Nancy Isenberg
13.  “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde
12.  “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
11.  “Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry
10.  “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
9.  “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
8.  “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
7.  “Dubliners” by James Joyce
6.  “Letters From the Earth” by Mark Twain
5.  “White Noise” by Don DeLillo
4.  “Endurance” by Alfred Lansing
3.  “Your Fathers, Where Are They?  And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?” by Dave Eggers
2.  “Into the Wild” by John Krakauer
1.  “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck

My top twenty favorite albums

20.  “Funeral” by Arcade Fire
19.  “Nobody Knows” by Willis Earl Beal
18.  “High Violet” by The National
17.  “The Battle of Los Angeles” by Rage Against the Machine
16.  “Swamp Ophelia” by Indigo Girls
15.  “Mirrorball” by Neil Young
14.  “Dis/Location” by Seven Mary Three
13.  “Abbey Road” by The Beatles
12.  “Graceland” by Paul Simon
11.  “Bitches Brew” by Miles Davis
10.  “‘Allelujah!  Don’t Bend!  Ascend!” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
9.    “Kid A” by Radiohead
8.   “Strangers to Ourselves” by Modest Mouse
7.   “This Will Destroy You” by This Will Destroy You
6.   “Time Out” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet
5.   “Secret Samadhi” by LIVE
4.   “Infinite Arms” by Band of Horses
3.   “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire
2.   “RockCrown” by Seven Mary Three
1.  “Into Your Lungs (and Around in Your Heart and On Through Your Blood)” by Hey Rosetta!

 

My top five composers

5.  Philip Glass
4.  Cliff Martinez
3.  Hans Zimmer
2.  Felix Mendelssohn
1.  Carl Nielsen

My top ten painters

10.  Edgar Degas
9.  George Bellows
8.  Mark Rothko
7.  Johannes Vermeer
6.  Mary Cassatt
5.  Maurice Prendergast
4.  Thomas Eakins
3.  Henri Rousseau
2.  Andrew Wyeth
1.  John Sloan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My 8th Favorite Song of All-Time

“Wake Up” by Arcade Fire

I fell in love with the band Arcade Fire via their debut album Funeral around 2007, a full two years before their song “Wake Up” (from the Funeral album) would be used to much ballyhoo in the trailer for the film “Where the Wild Things Are”, which would be my favorite movie of all-time from 2009-2011.  My point here is, “Wake Up” has been a major force in my life even before that famous trailer (one of two trailers to be able to move me to tears by force of trailer alone…the other one was this one).

“Wake Up”‘s lyrics are, admittedly, a little sophomoric.  They talk about how much it sucks to grow up (which it kinda does), and lyricist Win Butler may approach the subject just a bit too simply, but the emotion-drenched music and delivery transform the simple words into a towering screed of sorrow and triumph.

I have included only the live version, because it is all you need:

Maghound, Tree of Life, and holy boxes!

1.  Yesterday I learned that one of my nearest and dearest services, Maghound, will be going out of business.  Now, Maghound isn’t famous, and I’ve never mentioned it on this bloggy wog despite being a product evangelist for four years and an early adopter of the service (I signed up in it’s first month of beta testing).  What it is (was) is a service that allows you to recieve a bunch of magazines without subscribing to them, and to change which magazines you get a monthly basis.  I was usually on the 7-a-month plan, so I would choose 7 magazines from their vast selection.  If one month I got, say, Golf Magazine (I never did) and didn’t like it, I could change that slot the next month to get Mother Earth News (great mag).  Maghound wasn’t the method I used to get my favorite magazines—those I always actually subscribe to, the old-fashioned way, but Maghound has been a wonderful way for me to explore new realms of reading, and along the way, I’ve found a lot of publications that I’ve really loved, and been able to get one or two issues of magazines that interest me but not enough to recieve for a whole year.  It really has been a great service (and they have some of the best customer service representatives I’ve ever had to talk to) and I am extremely sad that it is going out of business.  It’s been a part of my life like Netflix is for myself and many others, and it sucks that there’s probably not even a single other person I know who will mourn it with me.  So I say here, on this tiny little bloggy wog:  I’ll miss you, Maghound!

2.  The order I would vote for the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (I’ve seen them all):

1.  The Tree of Life
2.  Hugo
3.  The Artist
4.  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
5.  The Descendants
6.  Midnight in Paris
7.  The Help
8.  Moneyball
9.  War Horse

3.  I’m not a pack rat, but it’s dawned on me recently that I may have a few too many things that I am just “kinda into” that I am constantly accruing for no serious purpose.  For instance, I can’t stop aquiring bags; I love getting messenger bags, sling backpacks,  cargo bags, and, most shamefully, totes.  I essentially have a closet full of these (thankfully inexpensive) things I almost have no use for.  In the summer, when I bike a lot, I have one small backpack that I use exclusively for biking, and one messenger bag (the first one I ever got) that I use when I do things like go to a Starbucks and write and read like a pompus asshole.  These bags are not falling apart anytime soon, so why I keep getting new ones is mystifying.

Likewise, I have about 200 more notebook-type things than I will use in a lifetime.  I simply cannot stop buying composition books (in 3-packs), small yellow legal pads, cheap black patent leather journals (for the love of God, don’t ever buy me a Moleskine journal, I hate them!), planners, and, oddly, these.  Now, I actually do quite a bit of writing, and not just the fancy-schmancy crapola that turns up on ye olde Notes From the Fire, but I’m always making little insignificant lists and writing little cheeseball sayings and quotes from movies and letters to friends, etc etc; I typically have one or two notebooks of various types going for each room of my apartment, and some that travel from room to room for various reasons.  I seriously require 7 or 8 different notebook-type things at any given time.  But I probably have close to a hundred (again…thankfully cheap) things of this nature right now.  I just love buying them. 

Guess what else this weirdo loves?  Boxes.  Not cardboard boxes, but boxes like this and this and this.  Oh, I’ve got them.  Oh, and photo boxes?  Michaels has them on sale for 2 bucks right now and it’s all I can do to keep myself from buying 50.

I guess what I’m saying is…what the hell is wrong with me?

My Favorite Movies of 2011

I don’t have a whole lot to say by way of a prelude here.  Just remember I am calling this list my favorites, not “the best”.  There are very few that I wanted to see that I didn’t get to see; the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are “The Artist”, “Carnage”, and “We Need to Talk About Kevin”.  As in the past, I have not included documentaries in the list, but I have put a non-ordered list of my favorite docs from 2011 at the end of this entry. OK, without further ado, my list:

10.  Mission Impossible:  Ghost Protocol

Just because a movie is a big budget crowd pleaser that isn’t, at it’s core, about deeply held human values or sad things, doesn’t mean it isn’t a hum-dinger of a film.  “MI4” is an expertly-crafted action-spy-drama that at times literally had me on the edge of my seat.  Although I knew Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt was not going to perish at any point, director Brad Bird somehow makes you believe he’s going to pull the trigger on him anyway.  And back for his second “mission”, Simon Pegg adds true humor and some believable heart that stops short of being hokey.

9.  Beginners

Hopefully someday our culture can get to a point where we can tell stories about gay folks without everyone having to make a big deal about the fact that it is about gay folks.  That sure was an unwieldy sentence.  Anyway, “Beginners” tells a new kind of story about gay folks: the story of a man in his twilight years, after his wife has died, finally able to “come out” in his final few months before his death; we get to see (in various flashbacks and flash-forwards) how this intense experience effects him and his son.  The father and son are played absolutely perfectly by Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor, respectively.  Would be on my short list for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

8.  Paranormal Activity 3

This choice will probably get me killed by some of you.  Listen, for all I know, these movies might be horrible.  All I know is, they scare the crap out of me.  I am a full-on believer in the “Blair Witch”-style realism, found-footage method.  Not that I find them all good (see: “The Last Exorcism”), but for the most part, they really scare the crap out of me, and when a horror movie can successfully scare the crap out of me, I am highly appreciative.  And “PA3” scared me even more than the first two.  The Paranormal Activity films continue to do well what most horror films—even found-footage horror films—don’t have the balls to do:  keep quiet and let the content of the film scare us.  That’s what “Blair Witch” did so well and that tradition is very much alive and well in this installment.

7.  The Beaver

  It’s a shame that the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson’s oversize problems all but buried this tiny little drama (directed by Jodie Foster, who also co-stars) about a man so overcome with depression that he resorts to communicating with the outside world through a hand puppet of a beaver.  What’s so amazing is that the premise is, of course, totally ridiculous, but the film pulls it off pitch-perfect, never too serious and never too ridiculous so that by the time the film ends, you are 100% on board.  This is thanks in no small part to keen direction from Foster, but also the best performance of Gibson’s career, which I do not think is faint praise (even in film’s like “Signs” Gibson is an underrated powerhouse).  Hopefully, someday the pallor surrounding Gibson’s off-screen persona will lift, and the world might discover this gem for the first time.

6.  Melancholia

Really, there is not enough space here for me to properly ruminate on director Lars von Trier’s most ambitious (and most commercially successful) film to date.  There is a ton going on, from infidelity, to calm depression, to a rogue planet colliding with the earth causing the end of all life as we know it.  Somewhere in there are metaphors both interesting and obvious, a tremendous use of Wagner’s opera “Tristan and Isolde”, Keifer Sutherland, and some of the most breathtaking cinematography of the year (courtesy of Manuel Alberto Claro, who hasn’t worked with von Trier before, which explains why this doesn’t look like a von Trier movie).  This one really has to be seen to be explained; I implore you to see it.

5.  Hugo

The true genius of Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” is its ability to play on many intellectual and emotional levels at once without ever coming off as a hoity-toity movie for film snobs, even though one of its most potent undercurrents is an emotional homage to the history of film.  Mixed up in that homage to film are themes on the loss of the ones we love, the desire to live forever, and the infinite sadness of childhood; all these themes are viewed through the prism of the world of “Hugo” as well as through the prism of film itself.  Scorsese manages to make us care about the characters he’s crafted as well as the medium they inhabit with equal passion.  If you are looking for a wonder-filled cinematic thrill ride with an emotional punch, this is for you; if you want to shed a few tears and also try to piece together exactly why you’re crying, “Hugo” will work for that, too.  Oh, and if you missed seeing it in 3D, you missed out big time.

4.  Drive

Ryan Gosling is beyond badass in this highly-stylized, atmospheric mood piece, and Carey Mulligan provides an emotional center in what I consider her true breakthrough performance.  Here, just watch this:

3.  The Future

This all-but ignored sophomore indie drama from Miranda July (her of the extraordinary first-feature “Me and You and Everyone We Know” from 2005) blew me away so much that after I saw it, I sat in stunned silence in my darkened apartment for at least 15 minutes, then showered in the dark for another 15 minutes.  I was no longer thinking about the movie, but my own life.  It is a “drama” about “relationships”, and certainly no film that fits that category has ever been so well-aligned with my own thoughts on the subject (currently largely cynical) while also enlightening me.  Warning: it is told very unconventionally and some elements of it are intentionally annoying, but I have never seen a movie quite like it, and it is deserving of much more acclaim than it has received.

2.  Meek’s Cutoff

In this quiet, deceptively-rambling “Western” (one must call it a Western due to its subject matter, but it hardly fits the genre) very loosely based on real events, the viewer is often unsure exactly what events are transpiring, whose side we are on, or what, really, we’re watching.  Dialogue can be difficult to hear and characters meld together.  And ultimately, the mystifying, vague ending leaves many viewers feeling cheated and let down.  So of course, I found it to be one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen.  The film defiantly skirts film convention in non-flashy ways to tell a story that is mystifying and vague, that questions the way we see good and evil, and leaves us feeling as lost and hopeless as the characters must feel.  How is that for a film being successful:  making the viewers feel the same powerful, horrid emotions it’s characters feel, just as the credits roll and we are left to our own lives with the lights going up.

1.  The Tree of Life

“The Tree of Life” is more than a movie.  It is more than a great film.  It is the guttural, visceral, all-nerves-and-tears experience of love, life after death, and the birth of the cosmos;  “The Tree of Life” is the questions we ask of eternity, and it is even the answers that come back.  Perhaps you think this sounds corny, or that I am overstating the case?  Well, maybe I am, but I don’t think so.  Be warned that this movie is told unconventionally.  It does not (for the most part) have a linear plot.  It has many sections that are designed more to be felt than understood.  It means to convey through images and sound the experience of being alive, and being dead, and being alive after others have died before you have; it means to tie these small, individual human experiences in with the whole of the universe from the beginning of time; it asks what our human presence means to the universe, what it means to us.  And yes, very famously, there are dinosaurs.  And Brad Pitt.  Just watch it.  You might not like it, but it also might change your life.

Movies I also really liked that just missed the cut, in no particular order:  “Margin Call”, “Albert Nobbs”, “The Descendants”, “A Better Life”, “The Conspirator”, “Red State”, “The Muppets”, “Midnight in Paris”, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”, “Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas”, “The Ides of March”, “J. Edgar”, “Bellflower”, “Insidious”, “Certified Copy”, “Win Win”, “Your Highness”, “Skateland”, “Take Shelter”, “The Rum Diary”, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”

And my favorite documentaries of 2011:  “The Interrupters”, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front”, “We Were Here”,  “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times”, “Honest Man: the Life of R. Budd Dwyer”, “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop”.

Still not interested in “The Tree of Life”?  Read this.

The Tree of Life

I don’t plan on updating my favorite directors list every single time something on it changes, but seeing as how I just posted the list, I thought I would share that my list of top 3 films directed by Robert Redford has just changed, after seeing “The Conspirator” yesterday.  I might like it a bit more than your average Joe, for it being about a subject I already have much interest in.  Anywho, my Redford list now looks like this:

3.  Ordinary People
2.  The Conspirator
1.  A River Runs Through It

Also, before the movie played, there was a trailer for the new Terrance Malick film.  If you’re not a silly movie dork like myself and you don’t know Terrance Malick, well, listen, new Malick films are big deals.  They come about once every ten years and they’re pretty much instant classics.  And not in the way “Titanic” is a classic, but more in the way that Kurosawa or Fellini’s films are classics.  The guy is a serious artist.  And I am a big fan.  And Brad Pitt and Sean Penn are in his new movie.  So needless to say, I was fucking rapt while watching this trailer.  And it was an amazing trailer.  It was one of those rare trailers that made me feel legitimately moved.  As I type this, the only one I can think of in recent memory was this trailer for “Revolutionary Road”.  So, while I know that watching the trailer here on my blog won’t have the same effect as it did for me in the theater, I implore you to watch this trailer for the upcoming Terrance Malick film “Tree of Life”…I find the visuals, sounds, and scant dialogue to be enormously evocative, despite very little (almost zero) plot being revealed: