Best Of 2007

Hello friends,

It's the end of the year so it's an obvious, psychologically satisfying time to list all of the best that 2007 had to offer in music, movies and television (in my not-so-humble opinion, anyway). Disagreements are to be expected, so feel free to post any comments or your own picks below. Just know that you're probably wrong and that I am, in fact, always right.

"How can it be bullshit to state a preference?"

Rob (John Cusack) in High Fidelity

Best Records (in no particular order)

-The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
-Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
-Feist, The Reminder
-Radiohead, In Rainbows
-Menomena, Friend And Foe
-Elvis Perkins, Ash Wednesday
-Kanye West, Graduation
-Avett Brothers, Emotionalism
-Jay-Z, American Gangster
-Okkervil River, The Stage Names
-Sondre Lerche, Phantom Punch
-The White Stripes, Icky Thump
-Ryan Adams, Easy Tiger
-Iron & Wine, The Shepherd's Dog
-Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha

Best Reissues, Soundtracks & Compilations

-Elliott Smith, New Moon
-Various Artists, I'm Not There O.S.T.
-Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True Deluxe Edition
-Eddie Vedder, Into The Wild O.S.T.
-Counting Crows, August And Everything After Deluxe Edition
-Sondre Lerche, Dan In Real Life O.S.T.

Good Albums, But Not Up To Par To Previous Achievements (try harder next time, please)

-Bright Eyes, Cassadega
-Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
-Band Of Horses, Cease To Begin
-Pinback, Autumn Of The Seraphs
-Devendra Banhart, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon

Best Japanese Psychedelic Pop Album

-4 Bonjour's Parties, Magpie Will Peck A Hole In My Plaster Cast

Best Comedy Album

-Patton Oswalt, Werewolves And Lollipops

Most Overrated Albums

-The National, Boxer (Somehow it still made it to 1 on Paste's list; I tried to stop them...)
-Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Not *actual* music!!)
-Panda Bear, Person Pitch

Albums That Would Have Made The "Best Of" List Had I Actually Listened To Them All The Way Through More Than Once

-Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
-Rogue Wave, Asleep At Heaven's Gate
-The Shins, Wincing The Night Away
-José González, In Our Nature
-Beirut, The Flying Club Cup

Best Albums I Haven't Heard Yet

-PJ Harvey, White Chalk
-Wu-Tang Clan, The 8 Diagrams
-Ghostface Killah, The Big Doe Rehab

Best Songs

-"Intervention" by The Arcade Fire
-"1234" by Feist
-"Young Folks" by Peter Bjorn and John
-"You Are My Face" by Wilco
-"Two" by Ryan Adams
-"All I Need" by Radiohead
-"Roc Boys (And The Winner Is...)" by Jay-Z Featuring Kanye West
-"Myriad Harbour" by The New Pornographers
-"Smile" by Lily Allen
-"Girls In Their Summer Clothes" by Bruce Springsteen
-"Lake Michigan" by Rogue Wave
-"Good Life" by Kanye West featuring T-Pain
-"Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe" by Okkervil River
-"Plaster Casts Of Everything" by Liars
-"You Know I'm No Good" by Amy Winehouse
-"The Underdog" by Spoon
-"Rag And Bone" by The White Stripes
-"The Heinrich Maneuver" by Interpol
-"Sinking Soon" by Norah Jones
-"Florida" by Modest Mouse

Guilty Pleasures (I must be getting pretty secure in my tastes 'cause I could only come up with a few that I truly feel guilty about this year)

-"Umbrella" by Rihanna (Enjoy it while eating paella, ella ella eh eh eh. Or while watching Cinderella, ella ella eh eh eh)
-"Walk It Out" by Unk (I actually had to look up who did that song; now I know)
-"Crank That" by Soulja Boy (I still don't understand a single word of it)
-"Makes Me Wonder" by Maroon 5 (This one I feel really guilty about)

Best Cover Songs

-Elliott Smith, "Thirteen" (Big Star)
-José González, "Teardrop" (Massive Attack)
-Alison Krause, "Trampled Rose" (Tom Waits)
-Devendra Benhart, "Little Boxes" (Malvina Reynolds)
-Regina Spektor, "Real Love" (John Lennon)
-Jeff Tweedy, "Simple Twist Of Fate" (Bob Dylan)
-The White Stripes, "Conquest" (Patti Page)
-Sondre Lerche, "Let My Love Open The Door" (Pete Townshend)

Best Mash-Up

-DJ Axel, "Guns N' Hovas" (Guns N' Roses' "Paradise City" v. Jay-Z's "Dirt Off Your Shoulder")

Coolest Aging Alternative Icon I Met This Year

-Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips at the Echo Project in October. He's slender and quite handsome. He was also wearing a bitching custom suit.

Band That I Once Loved But Should Have Stayed Broken Up For Its Own Good And The Good Of Humanity

-Smashing Pumpkins (Billy, just stop and let me still enjoy your first three albums in peace)

Best Singer-Songwriter That I Drove To A Gig In My Car Through Atlanta Rush Hour Traffic From The Paste Offices

-Josh Ritter on November 1st; we talked about Dylan and girls walking in the sunshine (he's weird)

Best Movies (I didn't see that many movies in the theater again this year so forgive me for my crappy selection)

-The Darjeeling Limited (probably my favorite)
-Knocked Up
-300
-Sicko
-Superbad
-Ocean's Thirteen
-Grindhouse: Planet Terror & Death Proof

Movies I Really Wanted To See But I Probably Won't Until I Can Netflix Them

-Zodiac
-Eastern Promises
-Lars And The Real Girl
-Into The Wild
-The King Of Kong
-Sunshine
-American Gangster
-Control
-Shoot 'Em Up
-Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
-I'm Not There

Movies I'm Going To See For Sure In The Next Two Weeks

-Juno
-Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
-No Country For Old Men

Worst Movie To See In A Theater Full Of Teenagers Who Feel Compelled To Talk On Their Cell Phones And Scream Advice To The Actors On The Screen Without Considering The Fact That It Might Ruin The Experience For Other More Mature Moviegoers

-Rob Zombie's Halloween (never again!)

Best Television Shows

-Entourage: Season 4 (HBO)
-The Sopranos: Season 6, Part 2 (HBO)
-Big Love: Season 2 (HBO)
-Real Time With Bill Maher (HBO)
-Flight Of The Conchords (HBO)
-Weeds: Season 3 (Showtime)
-Dexter: Season 2 (Showtime)
-The Office: Seasons 3&4 (NBC)
-Survivor: China (CBS)
-It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia: Season 3 (FX)
-The Henry Rollins Show (IFC)
-Iconoclasts (Sundance)
-No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain (Travel Channel)
-Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares (BBC, not the shitty FOX Version!)
-Gordon Ramsey's F Word (BBC)
-The Soup (E!)
-Best Week Ever (VH1)
-Pardon The Interruption (ESPN)
-Top Chef: Season 3 (Bravo)
-Attack Of The Show (G4)

Best Excuse To Get Digital Cable With DVR

-Being able to have a life that is not dictated by television schedules. That, and to instantly replay people getting hit in the nuts on American Funniest Home Videos. Oooh, and fast forwarding through commercials; watching an hour long show now only takes 41 minutes!

Best Unabashed Display of "Scarm" (Scar + Arm) On Television

-Padma Lakshmi on Bravo's Top Chef; disfiguring scars have never been so damn sexy.


So there you have it, I hope this list will inspire you to draft your own selections or perhaps encourage you to pick up an album or watch a show you otherwise wouldn't have.

See you next year!

A Stubborn Notion: "Jesus Camp" Fails To Shock

Adrienne and I watched Jesus Camp tonight. I'll spare you the set up of this documentary by letting Netflix do the work:

This riveting Oscar-nominated documentary offers an unfiltered look at a revivalist subculture where devout Christian youngsters are being primed to deliver the fundamentalist community's religious and political messages. Building an evangelical army of tomorrow, the Kids on Fire summer camp in Devil's Lake, N.D., is dedicated to deepening the preteens' spirituality and sowing the seeds of political activism as they're exhorted to "take back America for Christ."

So basically it shows the indoctrination of kids into the evangelical way of thinking (or lack thereof) at this summer camp in the Midwest through tactics right out of the Hitler Youth¹ playbook. The best description of the design and purpose of the camp is made by Becky Fischer, the founder and organizer, who equates it to an extremist Muslim training camp where children are molded into good little Jihadists --except she does it without a hint of sarcasm.

She sees her ministry as a sort of counterweight to other extremist religious groups and the godless liberals who she thinks are ruining America. Essentially, these kids are routinely and systematically transformed into little rhetoric-spewing mouthpieces of the Christian Right and encouraged to spread the message by any means necessary.

The documentary is anything but biased or preachy, choosing instead to let the subjects do the talking, most of which is done by the kids themselves. The only discernible "voice of reason" present in the film is of Air America's own Mike Papantonio (a Methodist who often criticizes the Christian Right) who at one point interviews Becky and calls in question her "teaching" methods and the glaring hypocrisies of her sect of Christianity.

Regardless of the apparent lack of persuasiveness and cajolery by the filmmakers, the inherent tone of the film is meant to incite outrage and/or utter terror at these events, which astonishingly take place in modern-day America.

I, however, was not affected in such a way.

I don't know if there's anything comparable to the "five stages of grief"² that applies to dealing with the Christian Right as a modern thinking person who values reason, but I feel like I've gone through several different stages myself.

I certainly used to get angry at this type of thing; it made me visibly resentful to see any type of commitment to the proliferation of ignorance and disinformation. I associated this rage with being passionate and I reveled in it without ever actually using it as a sort of catalyst for action.

And that, of course, is typical teen angst fare.

It's pure, carnal and self-serving. It's downright fun. It's rock n' roll. It's a Black Flag song. It's what teenagers are put on this earth to do.

But that type of unbridled rage gets old after a while (it starts looking forced and a bit naive and definitely stops helping you get laid) and I eventually moved on to trying to rationalize why certain people just don't get "it", almost to the point of making excuses for their way of thinking.

I blamed it on their upbringing, their surrounding environment, the encompassing establishment, morally bankrupt corporations, the traditional Puritanical culture of the U.S. and anything else that could be a sphere of influence on their soft, amorphic minds. In other words, it's not their fault, they are the product of what they themselves are sadly propagating.

But that logic is only applicable to a certain point. Even my extremely liberal mindset can't wrestle with the notion that people aren't somewhat responsible for their own predicaments. The intimation of the effects of upbringing and environment has a definite cut off point.

It certainly pertains to kids and young adults, much like the ones being programmed in Jesus Camp; they, after all, have a limited amount of inputs. But in this age of accelerated processes and open-ended information very few people in America live in a bubble, a suspended state of cryogenic storage. At some point of adulthood these people choose to be willfully ignorant and spiritually incurious for whatever reason --be it convenience, or perhaps the need to be antagonistic, headstrong or perversely indifferent.

So now I'm left to believe that they are just stubborn, ignorant douche bags for whom I should feel relatively nothing. That's why I wasn't outraged when in Jesus Camp a mother home schools her son to reject science as merely another belief system, global warming as something not to be worried about and that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old. I didn't wince at the sight of a man praying that George W. Bush finds the strength to appoint a Supreme Court Judge to overturn Roe V. Wade. I didn't even laugh when they all started speaking in tongues and wailing uncontrollably.

Not me, not anymore.

It must be a sign of the start of my curmudgeon stage when I become an empty shell of a man, too knowledgeable of life to learn anything new and too dead inside to care --ironically sharing the very qualities of the people I once despised.

But there is hope.

After a little girl described her favorite music as Christian Hard Rock and proceeded to dance and sing along, I still felt a silent, murderous rage for her display of bad taste in music.

Suddenly, I felt unbridled rage making a comeback.

¹The Hitler Youth, incidentally, increased by great numbers when it joined with the Evangelische Jugend (Evangelical Youth, a German youth organization with upwards of 600,000 members) in the mid 1930's. Coincidence?! I think not.

²In case you need a reminder of what these are: 1. shock followed by initial denial; 2. denial replaced by anger, rage, envy, and resentment; 3. bargaining (with God or the like); 4. depression; 5. ultimate acceptance.