music

Monday various

  • Sad to learn that author Kage Baker passed away from cancer over the weekend.
  • Not terribly surprised to learn that Sarah Palin’s political action committee spent more money buying her book than on, well, political action.
  • Very surprised to learn that packs of wild beagles are terrorizing the east end of Long Island.
  • Impressed by James Cameron’s letter to H.R. Giger’s agent about why Cameron didn’t involve Giger in the design and filming of Aliens. Where’s this kind of honest humility gone in the James Cameron of today?
  • And finally, very impressed by Chameleon Circuit, who put out some of the best Doctor Who-themed music I’ve ever heard. That might sound like I’m damning them with faint praise, to some of you, but I think these are really neat songs. One of them easily wound up on my January music mix. [via]

Tuesday various

  • Mother Jones on the death of literary magazines. To which my short answer is: same as it ever was, same as it ever was. I think there’s an argument to made that readership is down, but I don’t think that’s reflected in the number of different venues for writers. Some literary magazines will die off, or will be forced to adopt new business models — pay even less, change what they publish — but it seems like not a day goes by when another new magazine or journal doesn’t open up. [via]
  • How to make a Michael Cera movie [via]
  • Are there oceans of liquid diamond on Uranus and Neptune? [via]
  • I’m amused that somebody thinks “man listens to loud music and neighbors complain” is somehow more newsworthy because the loud music was John Denver.
  • And finally, I like this mashup of 2009’s top songs a whole lot more than the individual songs it’s made up of.

Thursday various

  • If it was up to me, Christopher Walken would read everything, not just Lady Gaga lyrics. [via]

  • Is there a good Roger Ebert and a bad Roger Ebert? Roger Ebert examines the question.

    I think I fall somewhere in between Ebert and Schneider on this, though I’m much less analytic about film than the latter. I do think Ebert sometimes lets emotion sway him too far in a movie’s favor (Congo comes to mind, for example.) But I almost understand why he likes something I think is awful, and I can’t disagree with his assertion that “film itself is primarily an emotional, not a cerebral, medium.”

  • Dave Kehr on Blu-Ray and DVD:

    For Blu-ray to look its best it requires picture and sound images of the finest, most pristine quality. That’s not difficult to come by in a contemporary release like “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (the best-selling Blu-ray of 2009), but is somewhat more problematic for a film made in Germany in 1926. Blu-ray exaggerates the faults in older material: the dust specks and scratches caused by decades of wear and tear, the softness of detail or harshness of contrast caused by duplication from sources several generations removed from the film that actually passed through the camera.

    He also shares this interesting statistic: “Turner Classic Movies online says that of the 162,984 films listed in its database (based on the authoritative AFI Catalog), only 5,980 (3.67 percent) are available on home video.”

    We will probably never achieve the utopian vision of having every film ever made available at the click of a mouse, but we are certain to move a little bit further in that direction in the decade ahead — with the cooperation of the studios or without them. (Copyrights will soon be expiring on the first wave of talkies.) In the meantime let us praise diversity. As confusing as the format wars may be, they keep hope alive.

  • Philip K. Dick on dreams and/or the universe’s practical jokes.

  • And finally, a famous Twilight Zone episode reimagined for a modern age. [via]

2009: My year in media

These are the books I read in 2009 — just shy of my hoped-for 50-book minimum. Reading the twelve books of Gene Wolfe’s so-called Solar Cycle slowed me down a little. Beyond the Wolfe (which I think I’m going to have to read again at some point), some of my favorite reads this year were Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert’s Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, Audrey Niffenegger The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Scott Westerfeld’s Midnighter trilogy. I don’t know what, if anything, that says about my reading habits and preferences. There were a couple of small disappointments in the list, but I don’t think I read a single bad book this year.

These are the movies I saw this year. Some of the highlights, in the order I saw them, were:

Honorable mentions include Doubt, Speed Racer (yes, really), Away We Go, The Man From Earth, and George Romero’s zombie ouevre, which I finally got around to watching all of this year. (I think it’s a toss-up between Dawn and Day of the Dead as my favorite.)

Surrogates and Lady in the Water were easily the worst movies I saw this year. (Excluding The Room, but I had Rifftrax to get me through that painful experience.) And at least Surrogates is tied up in fond memories of the Vegas Capfest.

I listened to a whole lot of music in 2009. You can see the evidence of that in my monthly mix CDs. That’s 223 songs altogether. Is it any wonder I had trouble putting together a “best of the year” mix?

I’m not even going to talk about the television I watched in 2009. Well, not yet anyway.

Monday various

  • “US pop star Britney Spears, seen here in August 2009, took aim at some of the tabloid stories that have dogged her through 2009, publishing a list of the top 75 articles deemed to be the most ridiculous.” Number one on the list? That she used to be an internationally famous and successful recording artist.
  • “Everywhere I turned, I found pain and loss, a procession of wasted lives, people who never fought Ali and, thus, won’t ever have someone come looking for them.” Muhammad Ali fought 50 men. Only one disappeared.” [via]
  • “The gases which formed the Earth’s atmosphere — and probably its oceans — did not come from inside the Earth but from outer space, according to a new study.” [via]
  • MC Frontalot uses Dungeons & Dragons to quit smoking. [via]
  • And finally, “Are the Stars?” [via]