I love the fact that two Filipino and Filipino American films -- Auraeus Solito's The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros and Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon's Cavite -- show up in the top twenty "Best First Film" category in this year's indieWIRE Critics Poll (the old Village Voice poll). Time for me to come up with my lame list soon...
Longtime readers of this blog would know that my year-end lists are usually composed of things from the year before -- or, indeed, many years before. Some are old (and new) songs I just discovered and burrowed themselves into my consciousness this year, some are old songs I've known for a while that finally clicked in this 12-month period.
It's in no order; the sequence is courtesy of an "anchored smooth shuffle" from MusicIP Mixer. All I picked was the first and last songs. (The whole thing also turned up as party favors for people this year.)
Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Stone in the River
Nina Simone – He Needs Me
Susie Suh – Won't You Come Away
Damien Rice – The Blower's Daughter
Shirley Collins & Davy Graham – Hares on the Mountain
The Ditty Bops - Pale Yellow
The Little Willies - For the Good Times
The Mountain Goats – No Children
Stereolab – Changer
Indigo Girls – Power Of Two
The Mountain Goats – Tallahassee
Jim O'Rourke – Naoru
Piano Magic – Bad Patient
Corinne Bailey Rae – Till It Happens To You
Corinne Bailey Rae – Put Your Records On
Regina Spektor – On the Radio
Rovo – Seer
The Mountain Goats – This Year
Herbert – Birds of a Feather
The Tammys – Egyptian Shumba
Skeeter Davis – Let Me Get Close to You
Stars – Reunion
YUI – Cloudy
Yo La Tengo – Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
パーランマウム – リンダ リンダ
Nil – Come On Eileen
YUI – LIFE
The New Pornographers – From Blown Speakers
The New Pornographers – The Laws Have Changed
Tommy february6 – MaGic in youR Eyes
McLusky – She Will Only Bring You Happiness
Stars – Ageless Beauty
No Doubt – Simple Kind of Life
Tommy february6 – je t'aime ★ je t'aime
McLusky – Alan Is a Cowboy Killer
Elbow – Buttons and Zips
Weezer – Only in Dreams
Wire – Outdoor Miner
Kings of Leon – The Bucket
Belarus – Here, There and Everywhere
Jim Noir – I Me You I'm Your
The Left Banke – She May Call You Up Tonight
Maria João & Mário Laginha – Pés No Chão
Kode 9 & Daddi G – Sign of the Dub
Hot Chip – Playboy
Brightblack Morning Light – Star Blanket River Child
Fiona Apple – Criminal
Kath Bloom – Come Here
Crowded House – Fall at Your Feet
Bruce Springsteen – O Mary Don't You Weep
Up Dharma Down – We Give In Sometimes
Up Dharma Down – Maybe
The New Pornographers – Letter From an Occupant
Matthew Sweet And Susanna Hoffs – She May Call You Up Tonight
At the Drive-In – One Armed Scissor
The High Strung – Never Saw It as Union
bird – 髪をほどいて
Todd Rundgren – Couldn't I Just Tell You
Golden Boy with Miss Kittin – Rippin Kittin
Native Guns – Work It
Kelis – Milkshake
Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
LCD Soundsystem – Daft Punk Is Playing at My House
Primal Scream – Exterminator
Korekyojin – Poet And Peasant
aiko – 赤いランプ
BMX Bandits – This Lonely Guy
BMX Bandits – I Wanna Fall in Love
Jacqueline Taïeb – 7 Heures du Matin
New Radicals – Someday We'll Know
Boards of Canada – Satellite Anthem Icarus
Is it just me, or has spam really become more poetic all of a sudden?
"subjugato," by Rosangela Rubino
(seems to know anything about. The more I discover about it -- the more it)
station twelve in two minutes. We are now in parking orbit.
One minute heavy stakes
into the ground with sledgehammers,
backed by the thud of I had no idea.
What do we want to do? As I said --
it's time for a decision. Do we all
In a moment, I equivocated -- and stopped dead.
For I had suddenly rolling up my face.
Collecting there. Dropping
The double image flickered and became one.
blow, then away again.
(apparently all of the same individual from what I could see as we strict policy of noncommunication. However it was photographed when)
Since I hardly have the energy anymore to devote to writing long entries, one more listy blog entry will have to do:
1. I have never had so many students coming in begging for incompletes: medical problems, family problems, laptop theft, eviction, and a lot of general overwhelmedness, you name it. There's something in the water that's precipitating all this panic and I don't know what it is.
2. Which means, as you guessed, that I'm in grading hell -- 10 20-page papers, 20 12-page papers, 50 final exams coming in the next week and a half.
3. Some cool news though: my former student Krish is coming to a TV near you.
4. For some reason or other, students actually want to be my teaching assistants next spring. (It's not paid work, but they get credit units.) This is also good news; must be something in the water too. I can't make them grade (against union rules), but this means that I can set up those discussion forums / blogs as I did in previous classes.
5. Plus some random musical thoughts that will either make you pause to reflect on your achievements in the last decade or make you slap yourself upside the head and go, "It's been ten years??"
a) Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister is ten years old.
b) Beck's Odelay is ten years old.
c) Fiona Apple's "Criminal" is ten years old.
d) Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die is ten years old.
e) Diana Krall's All For You is ten years old.
f) Underworld's "Born Slippy" is ten years old.
And proper debut albums were released ten years ago by this stellar bunch of veterans: Modest Mouse, DJ Shadow, Gillian Welch, PUFFY, Squarepusher, Cat Power, Fountains of Wayne, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. (And as someone reminded me elsewhere, Jay-Z.)
6. Okay, the reason for all these recent ruminations on age and the passing of time is because I'm turning a year older tomorrow and thinking about what I've gained and lost.
7. There is a stack of bluebooks on my desk. I'm staring at it willing it to shrink. It's not working.
8. If I see "definately" and "predominately" (and, I swear, "ludacris," but just once) one more time... "adequite," however, my students get right.
9. But a week from today I'll be on the coolest Xmas break ever (though much of it will be spent revising a manuscript), including Disneyland with Izzy for four days. Yessiree.
Sometimes concerts don't quite work. I and ten other people had met for dinner at Suppenkuche prior to a promising lineup of bands: When In Rome, Animotion, A Flock Of Seagulls, Bow Wow Wow, and Devo. Devo was perhaps the odd band out, a band whose big hit was somewhat contemporaneous with the other bands, but whose career had more in common with the arch, postpunk, agitprop bands of the previous decade.
The concert was supposed to start at 7, and it did not bode well that by the time we got to the venue a little after 8 pm, two bands had already played. (I had already seen When In Rome and Animotion previously, but still... I wanted to see them again!) The sad part was that the venue was literally only a third full; I suspect that by the time people actually arrived, all the opening bands had come and gone.
We caught A Flock of Seagulls do the last 4 songs of their set (granted, the set may have indeed been four songs long): "The More You Live, The More You Love," "Space Age Love Song," "Wishing," and "I Ran." They sounded good, but it sure looked like only the lead singer / keyboardist was left from the original lineup. (This touring version included a drummer who would stand on his stool at the end of each song and non-ironically point with a drumstick at the audience.)
Bow Wow Wow, however, was great. Annabella Lwin looked fantastic (a quick calculation on my fingers figured her out to be about a totally hot 40), and so was the band with an excellent short set. Quite a feat for a band whose biggest hit in the U.S. was a cover:
- I Started Something I Couldn't Finish (yes, the Smiths song!)
- Aphrodisiac
- Go Wild In The Country
- I Want Candy
- C30 C60 C90 Go!
Devo, alas, was something of a disappointment: yes, the band sounded great; yes, it was odd to see them riling up the crowd with bizarre walk-on characters like "Jihad Jerry" and a guy in an Osama bin Laden mask, and yes, it was great to hear my favorite Devo songs ("Gut Feeling" and "Gates of Steel" -- you can tell I like the jangly guitar songs better than the synth ones) -- but good lord, they looked way too... portly to still be dressed up in their yellow jumpsuits and wearing the red hats.
I wondered whether, in ten years, the same venue would be hosting, say, a big Weezer / Nada Surf / Third Eye Blind tour. In any case, it seemed that nostalgia had played us for fools, kind of. My friend Marco commented that the sparse audience was a clear comment on the survivors of the decade: if you hadn't gotten sick, or OD'd on coke, then you'd probably be there. But babysitters are expensive in San Francisco, I added.
Later Eloise and Sean and Romeo and I ended up at the Cat Club. Sixth beer in hand, dancing to "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" and "Tainted Love," looking around me at the people dressed up joylessly as Madonna and Slash, I started feeling this clumped-up ball of regret and inexplicable sorrow growing in my stomach, envisioning my metabolism screeching to a halt, imagining the grim reaper of middle age smoking cigarettes by the club exit waiting for everyone to file out. We could have been dancing to Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" and it wouldn't have made much of a difference.