the dreaded "25 things" virus

Those of you who have logged into Facebook in the last few weeks have very likely witnessed the wildfire spread of the "25 Random Things" meme / virus. I wasn't going to do it, and then last night I abruptly caved in and did it. I was fairly happy with the results so I thought I'd post them here as well.

1) In general, I like people and I like the world.

2) I enjoy making lists, and I spend more time than I probably should tracking data about my own life. For instance, I maintain a database of all the films I've ever seen (you can see the last 20 here)

3) I like having conversations, but I don't really like talking on the telephone.

4) I do, however, like text messaging, and I send several hundred text messages a month.

5) I like "experimental" music, film, writing, comics, and games, but really that just comes from liking music, film, writing, comics, and games so much that I want to experience them in the full variety of their forms. Put another way: I try not to be a snob.

6) I like collecting music, thinking about my music, and organizing and arranging my music. For a period I was buying at least one new CD a week. I've slowed down a bit lately, in part because I'm now involved in trading a lot of music with friends.

7) I am cripplingly dependent on iTunes, especially because of its rating feature, and the way it tracks Play Count and Date Last Played. My music listening is increasingly dictated by the interplay of these particular data-sets.

8) I like to dance, and I like almost anything that qualifies as dance music, from Beyonce to Mouse on Mars.

9) In the mid-1990s, I taught myself how to rap, and I still have a few fairly lengthy raps committed to memory. I intended it to be tongue-in-cheek, but I have actually come to believe that it is one of my more impressive talents.

10) I've been in two bands, and performed music live on stage somewhere around 30 times, although I have no musical training and generally consider myself to have no actual musical talent.

11) I use humor as a sort of social lubricant, and don't believe I could really be friends with someone who didn't think I was funny.

12) I would rather be thought of as attractive than be thought of as smart, although I put WAY more energy into being smart than I do into being attractive.

13) I enjoy flirting, sexual tension, and sexual confusion. If I'm not experiencing two out of three in any given week I will begin to make ill-advised decisions.

14) I think of sex as only one form of a larger category of intimacy, and I think that people who think sex is a particularly unique or special form of intimacy are engaged in a conceptual error. I am not immune to making this error myself, at times, although I try to catch myself.

15) I detest money, and I detest the things people must do to get money. The fact that I care as much as I do about money is one of the things I dislike about myself.

16) I do, however, enjoy teaching, and I believe that I am good at it.

17) I am fascinated by violence, and representations of violence. I don't ENJOY movies that depict torture and violence but I am unquenchably curious about them and will eventually end up seeing them all. (They're always worse in my imagination, just FYI.)

18) From roughly age 12 to age 18, I participated in a program called "Cinekyd," which taught young people the basics of film and television production. I spent most of my Cinekyd time in the "Graphics and Minatures" department, learning about special effects. This is undoubtedly part of where my love of science fiction and horror films comes from.

19) My immediate family has an endearing interest in grotesque stories about things like bodily functions. Hearing a story of this sort around the dinner table is one of the ways that I can tell that I am "home."

20) I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe that places can be haunted. I make no real effort to reconcile this apparent discontinuity.

21) I don't really believe in magic, but in the spirit of experiential knowledge I performed a few "spells" just to see what would happen. The results were... interesting?

22) I have many fond memories of playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I still have my polyhedral dice nearby should someone drop by and want to fire up a game.

23) I spent many hours as a young child playing the Atari 2600, and will still occasionally load up a Web-based replica of the old 2600 game "Adventure," a game in which your "character" is simply an unadorned rectangle.

24) I am one of those people who has Opinions About Fonts.

25) I am seldom bored, and am usually at my happiest when engaged in mutiple projects. An old friend once told me he wished that I could have 36 hours in every day, and I still count that as one of the nicest things anyone ever said about me.

Labels: lists, personal

Monday, January 26, 2009
8:52 AM
1 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#1)

1. Fuck Buttons, Street Horsssing

In my imagination, the story goes like this: a couple of kids from the Bristol noise scene sagely decide to try to use structure and rhythm to harness some of the energy and intensity of noise music, in the interest of getting it to yield something amazing. And the amazing yield in question proves to be nothing less than—ecstatic beauty! Wild success. Interestingly, substitute "punk music" for "noise music" and you can see that acts like the Boredoms and Black Dice have also attempted a version of this experiment and attained identical results—indeed, look at Street Horsssing next to the Boredoms' Vision Creation New Sun and Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons.and it looks like nothing less than the disc that completes this decade's most awesome trilogy. Thanks to Nancy P. and Steve F., who both correctly intuited that I would like this album.

Listen: Fuck Buttons, "Bright Tomorrow"

And that concludes this year's top ten. Want them all in a single post for easier linking purposes? Try here. The MP3s should remain up for at least another few weeks.

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Sunday, December 28, 2008
8:54 AM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#2)

2. The Dodos, Visiter

Two dudes, one on guitar and one on drums, one of them singing, and a female vocalist who occasionally joins in—sounds like an indie-pop formula that's pretty much been done to death. But the Dodos approach it with a zeal and urgency that make it seem brand new. Part of it is the emphasis on percussion: drummer Logan Kroeber works overtime to provide unusual timing for each song, providing sonic interest without devolving into wank, and guitarist Meric Long follows suit, exploring the potential of the guitar as a rhythmic device. The end result is little indie gems that also provide amazement and pleasure simply as kinetic or propulsive constructions. Endlessly listenable.

Listen: The Dodos, "The Season"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Saturday, December 27, 2008
7:50 AM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#3)

3. Rameses III, Basilica

Last year, Rameses III released Honey Rose, an modest yet perfect little driftwork which ended up slipping onto my Best of 2007 list. This year’s Basilica shows them growing both more assured and more ambitious, releasing a suite of astral-plane drones that evokes majesty without sacrificing their characteristic gentle lull. Imagine the broadest dawn you’ve ever seen and you’ve got the recommended visual. Includes a second disc of "remixes" by drone-underground stars like Robert Horton and Neal Campbell as a bonus. On Important.

Listen: Rameses III, "Origins V"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, December 26, 2008
11:38 AM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#4)

4. Jamie Lidell, Jim

There's an appropriative aspect to the whole "blue-eyed soul" thing that often makes me a little squeamish, so I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoy pasty-white geek Jamie Lidell's barn-burners as much as I do. On this album, Lidell's third, he strips away some of the electronic frippery and analog burble that he used to ornament his earlier albums with and plays it instead as a straight-up revivalist act. And why shouldn't he?: he's got the charisma, pipes, and songwriting chops of any one of the greats. (If you're really feeling guilty about the appropriative element and want something a little more authentic, round out your purchase of this record with a purchase of this year's fine compliation Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia.)

Listen: Jamie Lidell, "Another Day"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Thursday, December 25, 2008
10:57 AM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#5)

5. Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, Glistening Pleasure

Earlier this year, I described these guys as "hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced." That sounds like something that might wear thin after a few listens, but this album became one that I found myself returning to again and again, and growing more enamored of, not less.

Listen: Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, "Slow Motion Tag Team"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Wednesday, December 24, 2008
8:02 AM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#6)

6. Brightblack Morning Light, Motion to Rejoin

As a guy who loves his Internet, I find Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes' back-to-nature / get-off-the-grid / Native-Americans-had-it-right trip a little hard to swallow at times, but listen to the music and you have to admit that they might be on to something: this bit of laid-back, smoked-out, electric psychedelic desert blues is a pretty mesmerizing piece of work. The best album Matador has put out since Matmos' The Civil War (2003).

Listen: Brightblack Morning Light, "Hologram Buffalo"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Tuesday, December 23, 2008
9:02 AM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#8)

8. Pocahaunted, Island Diamonds

The best way to imagine Bethany and Amanda, the two women who comprise Pocahaunted, is to imagine them calling to you, in their wordless sirenlike style, as you are descending deeper and deeper into a drug-induced coma. (It might even be worth waking up in the hospital just to hear these sounds.) They've been releasing a fairly steady stream of releases in obscuro formats; this one gets the nod because it benefits from its (comparatively) high-profile release on the Not Not Fun label, and because the presence of drummer Bob[b?] Bruno gives it a dose of extra structure and urgency.

Listen: Pocahaunted, "Riddim Queen"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Sunday, December 21, 2008
10:50 AM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#9)

9. Cloudland Canyon, Lie In Light

A lot of bands lately have returned to drink from the well of 70s-era German progressive music, but Cloudland Canyon stands out from the pack. They approach the ecstatic, psychedelic pastoralism of that era less as a source to be emulated and more as an open-ended experiment that they have made it their mission to complete. Their 2004 album Requiems der Natur was an intriguing curiosity; this year's Lie In Light is a minor masterpiece. Thanks to Chris P. for tipping me off to these guys. On Kranky.

Listen: Cloudland Canyon, "Krautwerk"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Saturday, December 20, 2008
5:52 AM
0 comments

top ten 10 albums from 2008

10. Juana Molina, Un Dia

Is Juana Molina the Latin American Bjork? Er, probably not, but fans of exotic elf-women might will find a lot to like in Molina's vaguely alien song-constructions. (Plus, check out this album cover, my favorite of the year.) And, at the risk of essentializing, Molina's palette is distinctly sub-equatorial: it's sometimes classified as electronica, but it's driven at least as much by its Rioplatense vocals, Argentinian rhythmic elements, and loops of acoustic guitar. Warm, weird, and lovely. On Domino.

Listen: Juana Molina, "Vive Solo"

9. Cloudland Canyon, Lie In Light

A lot of bands lately have returned to drink from the well of 70s-era German progressive music, but Cloudland Canyon stands out from the pack. They approach the ecstatic, psychedelic pastoralism of that era less as a source to be emulated and more as an open-ended experiment that they have made it their mission to complete. Their 2004 album Requiems der Natur was an intriguing curiosity; this year's Lie In Light is a minor masterpiece. Thanks to Chris P. for tipping me off to these guys. On Kranky.

Listen: Cloudland Canyon, "Krautwerk"

8. Pocahaunted, Island Diamonds

The best way to imagine Bethany and Amanda, the two women who comprise Pocahaunted, is to imagine them calling to you, in their wordless sirenlike style, as you are descending deeper and deeper into a drug-induced coma. (It might even be worth waking up in the hospital just to hear these sounds.) They've been releasing a fairly steady stream of releases in obscuro formats; this one gets the nod because it benefits from its (comparatively) high-profile release on the Not Not Fun label, and because the presence of drummer Bob[b?] Bruno gives it a dose of extra structure and urgency.

Listen: Pocahaunted, "Riddim Queen"

7. Scott Tuma, Not For Nobody

Back when I lived in Chicago, I saw Scott Tuma perform a bunch of times as part of the exemplary Good Stuff House trio, so I knew he was one of the more interesting experimental guitarists out there. But that didn't adequately prepare me to expect him to release this beautiful and curiously moving album of Americana folk guitar. It retains its "experimental" status by including a few left-of-center gestures, but it's more heartfelt than it is cerebral. Thanks to Chris M. for sending this along.

Listen: Scott Tuma, "Fishen"

6. Brightblack Morning Light, Motion to Rejoin

As a guy who loves his Internet, I find Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes' back-to-nature / get-off-the-grid / Native-Americans-had-it-right trip a little hard to swallow at times, but listen to the music and you have to admit that they might be on to something: this bit of laid-back, smoked-out, electric psychedelic desert blues is a pretty mesmerizing piece of work. The best album Matador has put out since Matmos' The Civil War (2003).

Listen: Brightblack Morning Light, "Hologram Buffalo"

5. Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, Glistening Pleasure

Earlier this year, I described these guys as "hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced." That sounds like something that might wear thin after a few listens, but this album became one that I found myself returning to again and again, and growing more enamored of, not less.

Listen: Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, "Slow Motion Tag Team"

4. Jamie Lidell, Jim

There's an appropriative aspect to the whole "blue-eyed soul" thing that often makes me a little squeamish, so I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoy pasty-white geek Jamie Lidell's barn-burners as much as I do. On this album, Lidell's third, he strips away some of the electronic frippery and analog burble that he used to ornament his earlier albums with and plays it instead as a straight-up revivalist act. And why shouldn't he?: he's got the charisma, pipes, and songwriting chops of any one of the greats. (If you're really feeling guilty about the appropriative element and want something a little more authentic, round out your purchase of this record with a purchase of this year's fine compliation Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia.)

Listen: Jamie Lidell, "Another Day"

3. Rameses III, Basilica

Last year, Rameses III released Honey Rose, an modest yet perfect little driftwork which ended up slipping onto my Best of 2007 list. This year's Basilica shows them growing both more assured and more ambitious, releasing a suite of astral-plane drones that evokes majesty without sacrificing their characteristic gentle lull. Imagine the broadest dawn you’ve ever seen and you’ve got the recommended visual. Includes a second disc of "remixes" by drone-underground stars like Robert Horton and Neal Campbell as a bonus. On Important.

Listen: Rameses III, "Origins V"

2. The Dodos, Visiter

Two dudes, one on guitar and one on drums, one of them singing, and a female vocalist who occasionally joins in—sounds like an indie-pop formula that's pretty much been done to death. But the Dodos approach it with a zeal and urgency that make it seem brand new. Part of it is the emphasis on percussion: drummer Logan Kroeber works overtime to provide unusual timing for each song, providing sonic interest without devolving into wank, and guitarist Meric Long follows suit, exploring the potential of the guitar as a rhythmic device. The end result is little indie gems that also provide amazement and pleasure simply as kinetic or propulsive constructions. Endlessly listenable.

Listen: The Dodos, "The Season"

1. Fuck Buttons, Street Horsssing

In my imagination, the story goes like this: a couple of kids from the Bristol noise scene sagely decide to try to use structure and rhythm to harness some of the energy and intensity of noise music, in the interest of getting it to yield something amazing. And the amazing yield in question proves to be nothing less than—ecstatic beauty! Wild success. Interestingly, substitute "punk music" for "noise music" and you can see that acts like the Boredoms and Black Dice have also attempted a version of this experiment and attained identical results—indeed, look at Street Horsssing next to the Boredoms' Vision Creation New Sun and Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons.and it looks like nothing less than the disc that completes this decade's most awesome trilogy. Thanks to Nancy P. and Steve F., who both correctly intuited that I would like this album.

Listen: Fuck Buttons, "Bright Tomorrow"

1. Fuck Buttons, Street Horsssing

In my imagination, the story goes like this: a couple of kids from the Brixton noise scene decide, and rightfully so, that the energy and intensity of noise music could yield something amazing if it were harnessed by structure and rhythm. So they give it a try. And the amazing yield in question proves to be nothing less than—ecstatic beauty! Interestingly, substitute “punk music” for “noise music” and you can see that acts like the Boredoms and Black Dice have also attempted a version of this experiment and attained identical results—indeed, look at Street Horsssing next to the Boredoms’ Vision Creation New Sun and Black Dice’s Beaches and Canyons.and it looks like nothing less than the disc that completes this decade’s most awesome trilogy.

Listen: Fuck Buttons, “Bright Tomorrow“

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, December 19, 2008
10:48 PM
0 comments

10 albums from 2008 (#10)

Yes, we're in the final throes of 2008, which means that once again I come to you with my top ten albums of the year (with MP3s!), stretched out over ten posts to "build suspense."

Without further ado, then, I bring you...

10. Juana Molina, Un Dia

Is Juana Molina the Latin American Bjork? Er, probably not, but fans of exotic elf-women might will find a lot to like in Molina's vaguely alien song-constructions. (Plus, check out this album cover, my favorite of the year.) And, at the risk of essentializing, Molina's palette is distinctly sub-equatorial: it's sometimes classified as electronica, but it's driven at least as much by its Rioplatense vocals, Argentinian rhythmic elements, and loops of acoustic guitar. Warm, weird, and lovely. On Domino.

Listen: Juana Molina, "Vive Solo"

Labels: audio_commentary, lists, mp3s, music_commentary

10:04 PM
0 comments

my 100 favorite films

As some of you might know, I've been maintaining a complicated Film Viewing database which contains an incomplete (but growing) list of basically every film I've ever seen. One of the fun aspects of doing this is that I've set up a filtered view of this database which selects the films that I've given a rating of 9 or 10 to... thus auto-deriving a list of my "favorite" films.

As of today, when I added Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) to the database, the number of films on the "favorites" page hit exactly 100. Check it out.

It's organized chronologically, and you'll notice that it skews a bit towards recent films, in part because the 2000s have been a pretty good decade for film and in part because this database primarily (although not exclusively) reflects films I've watched or re-watched in the past two years. That said, there are definitely some blind spots: I'm sure there were some masterpieces produced between 1944 and 1954, but I'm not sure I've seen them.

This list reflects my personal favorites, and not necessarily the films I'd consider "canonical," although there is some overlap. (The 100 canonical films list, which could use some revision around now, can be found here.)

Comments and suggestions are welcome...

Labels: lists, media commentary

Friday, October 24, 2008
12:27 PM
1 comments

my movie life

This post is part of Culture Snob's "Self-Involvement" Blog-A-Thon, running July 9-13th. For this Blog-A-Thon, Jeff's asked film bloggers to blog not so much about movies, but about oneself, as seen through the lens of movies. As an example, he linked to an old piece of his writing, "My Movie Life," sharing some key personal details about, well, his life and the movies. That proved too irresistible a model not to follow steal. So without further ado, here's a cool thirty fragments of my own movie life.

1. The first movie I remember seeing was Star Wars (1977), which I saw with my parents at the local drive-in theatre. I remember items in the car (in particular, a Styrofoam cooler) more than I remember anything about that particular viewing of the movie.

2. I feel fortunate to have had that drive-in theatre as a place to hang out in my adolescence, an experience that nothing else really substitutes for. Movies I can remember seeing there: Jurassic Park (1993), Total Recall (1990), Mom and Dad Save the World (1992). The site of the drive-in is now a Target.

3. I can remember having to leave the theatre early during a viewing of Superman (1978), because I was sniveling and crying. (I think the reason for this was because the non-Superman parts were too slow and boring, but I cannot really recall the incident.)

4. The first cinematic nudity I ever saw was on videotape; a friend showed me Risky Business (1983) and the nearly-forgotten My Tutor (1983).

5. The first cinematic nudity I saw in the theatre was Revenge of the Nerds (1984). (I was with a group of young men who went for a friend's birthday party; we were accompanied by his father.)

6. The only R-rated movie I can recall being turned away from at the box office was David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986); it is still one of my favorite movies.

7. I can remember seeing a videotaped copy of Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in around sixth grade, and I remember the first murder in that film made an astonishing impact on me. I still can't watch that movie without feeling a mix of anticipation and genuine dread as that scene approaches.

8. In the wake of this, I spent maybe five years watching as many different 80s slasher or monster movies as I could get my hands on, most of them not very good.

9. The films that mark the end of this phase, for me, are Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), both of which I saw in 1990 or 1991, and both of which left me feeling depressed and more than a little unclean. My relationship to horror has been love-hate ever since.

10. Around 1988-1990 I saw videotaped copies of Blue Velvet (1986) and Pink Flamingos (1979), both of which, in their own ways, provided the same visceral shock that Nightmare on Elm Street had provided, but both clearly had agendas that were more complicated than mere shock. Each of these dramatically expanded my sense of what cinema could legitimately try to do.

11. I saw Wild at Heart (1990) three times in the theatre. Its prurient mix of sex, violence, and Americana really was pretty ideal for me at age 17. (As an adult, I've come to think of it as one of Lynch's weaker films.) A few years later I saw Pulp Fiction (1994) in the theatre three times. I believe the most recent film I've done that with was The Incredibles (2004).

12. Eraserhead (1977) was a David Lynch film that was legendary in my suburban neighborhood (this was in the wake of Twin Peaks, when David Lynch was getting cover-story profiles in Time) but copies of it were hard to find—there was only one video store in the area that carried it (Southampton Video). That was the first movie that I went substantially out of my way to see. (It is still one of my favorite movies.)

13. Delicatessen (1991) was the first film that I read reviews of when it was still in theaters, and travelled into Philly from my suburban home to see at an art house theatre (the Ritz, where I would later work for a short stint). The second film I did this for was Naked Lunch (1991). (Both of these are still among my favorite movies.)

14. The first film I ever saw that I wanted to watch again the second I finished it was Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

15. Movies I owned, early on: I recorded Yellow Submarine (1968) off of television; I bought a copy of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) when the video store was liquidating their Betamax stock; I purchased a copy of Heathers (1989) in 1990 and began to wear a black trench coat almost immediately thereafter. I've probably seen each of these films at least ten times, and I don't think I've seen any of them in the last ten years, although I still own a copy of Yellow Submarine.

16. The first foreign-language film I ever saw was probably Fellini's Amarcord (1973).

17. The first foreign-language film I ever counted as one of my favorite films was Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

18. I owe a lot of my film literacy to my years at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, which had a private screening room in the basement of the library that students could use, and a fairly good stock of freely-available films. This was a great resource at a time when I had little money, and I saw an incredible number of important films in that little room.

19. One of the things I watched down there was Fantasia (1940), which also marks the first time I ever took acid.

20. I took a few great film seminars at La Salle, including one on Hitchcock and one on Coppola, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (a course inspired, I believe, by their pairing in the relatively weak New York Stories (1989)).

21. The first film writing I can ever remember doing I did for these seminars: I remember doing a "close reading" on a scene from Taxi Driver (1976) and one on the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

22. Also at LaSalle, some other film geek students and I formed a film club. We were allowed to use one of the screening classrooms as long as we could make the argument that we were using it for educational purposes; to this end, we were required to have a student give an informative lecture about whatever film we'd screened. I can recall personally giving lectures on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barton Fink (1991).

23. Also at La Salle, in someone's dorm room, I watched my first pornographic video. The name eludes me but I did not find it especially erotic. (I am pretty sure that on the same day and in the same dorm room, I saw Blade Runner (1982) for the first time.)

24. I am seldom aroused by film (including porn); that may be a side effect of being in my mid-thirties, but I can't remember being especially aroused by any earlier films, either. Perhaps it's the mediating effect of cinema, but movies make sex or nudity seem weirdly abstract or stylized somehow (I think it may do the same thing with violence, only to a net positive effect instead of a net negative effect). In any case, film ranks a distant fourth in terms of its erotic impact on me (behind interpersonal interaction, imagination, and language (either written or spoken)).

25. Along these lines, I mostly don't get crushes on actresses, although there are at least a few who have done a scene here or there that is stored somewhere in my erotic memory. I will confess, however, that in early adolescence I found Wendy Schall's character in The 'Burbs (1989) to be the paragon of female beauty. And there was a period where I probably wanted a girlfriend like Beetlejuice / Heathers-era Winona Ryder. More recently, I wanted a girlfriend like Patricia Arquette in True Romance (1993), and I appreciate every moment of her smokin'-hot presence in Lost Highway (1997).

26. The last movie I can remember feeling aroused by while viewing was Sex and Lucia (2001). If anyone's got a more recent recommendation of something that Worked For You, well, that's what the comments box is for. Bring it on.

27. The last movie that made me squirm in my seat with discomfort was Oldboy (2003), and the one before that was Audition (1999). I found the first Saw (2004) to be laughably tame by comparison. Again I'll ask for recommendations.

28. I went through a period where I didn't watch many movies, roughly 2004-2006.

29. I got re-interested in them through a project where I tried to come up with a "canon" of 100 important films for a friend. The final version, as I came up with it, is here, and the set of posts that documents the entire long process of brainstorming it can be found here. This made me realize how much I liked film, and how many important films I still hadn't seen.

30. I keep track of everything I see nowadays, and export the results to a webpage which can be viewed here. I try to do at least a short write-up of nearly everything I see and many of these get cross-posted to Netflix. My reviewer rank at Netflix, as of this writing, is 36,928, and if there's anything more self-involved than monitoring your Netflix reviewer rank, I don't know what it might be.

Labels: lists, media commentary, personal

Thursday, July 10, 2008
10:56 AM
1 comments

100 book challenge: part six: miscellany

Down to the final fifteen of the 100 Book Challenge!

• As long as we're coming out of the graphic design shelf, we might as well move into Beautiful Evidence, by design critic Edward Tufte
  [I panned this book a bit when I first read it, believing it to re-hash some of the material from Tufte's earlier books. However, that also makes it the easiest one to select if I'm going to take just one. It is probably the most well-designed one of the batch.]
  

• Re-Search #11: Pranks!
  [Back in the good old days of the mid-nineties, Re-Search was the ultimate arbiter of what was cool and underground, and I'm grateful to them to introducing me to a lot of different countercultural thinkers. Of the Re-Search volumes I have, this is the one that meant the most to me, but Angry Women, Modern Primitives, and the Industrial Culture Handbook are all just about equally worth bringing.]
  

• Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge
  [Along the same lines as the Re-Search books, this was a book that taught the young Jeremy about what was cool. (The book's main answer to that question: geeks and psychedelic shit.) Some of the tech romance has lost its luster in the, er, fifteen or so years since this book came out, but I'm more than willing to hold onto it as perhaps the single volume that best explains how I ended up the way I did.]
  

• Along these same "formative" lines, I'm not sure I can part with any of what I consider to be the three key Advanced Dungeons and Dragons texts: the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual.
  [I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons in probably five years now, but these three books basically describe how to generate and stock an entire fictional world, and determines coherent rules for how players can interact with that world: the amount of entertainment that can be extracted from their triangulation is truly limitless. A book that strips away the fantasy trappings in an attempt to provide an even broader basis for world-building is the GURPS Basic Set, which I'm also tempted to bring but which I don't think would make a list that caps at 100.]
  

• Continuing with games, I'd bring the Redstone Editions Surrealist Games book-in-a-box...
  

• ...and the Oulipo Compendium, which defines a mind-boggling number of literary constraints to play around with...
  

• ...and Jeff Noon's Cobralingus, which takes the idea of literary constraints and fascinatingly updates it by mashing it up with the kind of gate/filter/patch mechanism familiar from real-time sound synthesis programs like AudioMulch.
  

• And ultimately, for when I was through with the wacky wordplay and wanted to get back to writing normal English-language sentences, I'd bring a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

I'd cram in a few more great works of fiction...

• Cathedral, by Raymond Carver
  

• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
  

• my version of Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
  [My edition has great illustrations by Rockwell Kent, circa 1930.]
  

• ...and one excellent work of humor: Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source
  

• ...and maybe one exemplary picture book for children: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg

And that'd be 100 (OK, closer to 115, given the various cheats and bundles I stuck in there.) Could I live with this 100? Maybe, although there's a lot of good writing in the piles left that remain. I find myself already wanting to make a list of a second hundred... the "honorable mentions," perhaps...

Labels: book_commentary, lists, projects

Monday, July 07, 2008
5:31 PM
0 comments

100 book challenge part five: comics, art books, graphic design

Thirty books left to go in the 100 Book Challenge!

Last time I left off on the cusp of "comics," so let's proceed into that realm. I'm fortunate that a lot of the comics I want to bring are actually in comics form, in long-boxes under my bed, and are thus exempt from the purge. But in terms of "trade paperbacks," let's see.

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  [Totally essential; besides being a gripping thriller, this is also a decade-by-decade history of the archetype of the "costumed hero" in the twentieth century, with an appreciation of the form of the "horror comic" thrown in to boot. It's also one of the best examinations of what it means to be an aging superhero; in this regard it is joined by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which I'd bring if I hadn't lost my copy somewhere.]
  

• From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
  [If I can bring another Moore, I'd pick this paranormal retelling of the Jack the Ripper story.]
  

• Read Yourself Raw, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
  [A giant, oversized version volume collecting selections of the first three issues of "the comics magazine for damned intellectuals." My introduction to Spiegelman, Charles Burns, Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, and Windsor McCay. Speaking of whom....]
  

• Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, by Windsor McCay
  [Surreal, fantastic dream comics, circa 1904 (predating Surrealism by a comfortable margin).]
  

• Rabid Eye: The Dream Art of Rick Veitch, by Rick Veitch
  [More dream comics, these circa 1996. But no less fantastic.]
  

• Cheating: I have most of the run of G. B. Trudeau's Doonesbury in a series of volumes: The Portable Doonesbury, The People's Doonesbury, The Doonesbury Chronicles, etc. Any of the individual volumes might not be that valuable, but together they make a form of the Great American Novel.
  

• Another cheat: volumes 4, 5, and 6 of the book-sized comics anthology Kramer's Ergot
  [Probably the most important comics anthology since those 80s RAW volumes. I'm not sure I could part with a volume.]
  

• And another cheat: volumes 1-4 of Joss Whedon / John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men
  [I've been reading a lot of comics this year, and I'm prepared to say that, although this isn't high art, it's probably the best stuff that mainstream comics is putting out these days.]
  

• American Splendor Presents: Bob and Harv's Comics, by Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar
  [Crumb and Pekar are both essential comics creators, and getting both of them, at the top of their respective games, makes this volume a must-keep.]
  

• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware
  [Ware's world-view is bleak enough to nearly constitute a form of comedy, but there's no doubt that he's an absolute master of comics form and vocabulary.]
  

• Monkey Vs. Robot, by James Kochalka
  [A little bit of brilliant minimalist stuff... his American Elf collection is also great, but I have that in individual-issue form.]
  

• The Frank Book, by Jim Woodring
  [Jim Woodring drew my LiveJournal user icon, a character named Frank who roams about in a creepy, psychologically-rich cartoon universe. This stuff is a good example of the kind of things that can really only be done in comics (they've been turned into animated films, but their eerie, airless logic works best on the page).]

The Frank Book is a big coffee-table style book, so let's transition and throw a few more of those into here:

• Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective
  [Published by the Guggenheim, this 632-page tome contains somewhere around 500 color reproductions of Rauschenberg's work, and another couple hundred in black-and-white. This is also probably the most expensive book I have ever bought for myself (and it would be even more expensive to replace, apparently.) Worth it, though: Rauschenberg, to me, is one of the key artists of the 20th century, bringing together (in a single figure) strands of Abstract Expressionist, Pop, and Fluxus.]
  

• Paul Klee
  [Another Guggenheim edition. Klee is another of my favorite visual artists, and although this volume isn't as comprehensive as the Rauschenberg one, it's well worth hanging on to.]
  

• I'll bundle two graphic design books here as a final cheat: Sonic: Visuals for Music and 1 + 2 Color Designs, Vol. 2. Neither one is a masterpiece, which is part of how I can justify bundling them, but I do flip through them fairly frequently when needing ideas for graphic design projects, and books of this sort are expensive, and thus a pain to replace.]

Fifteen books left to go, and what's left in the collection? Mostly just miscellany. Stay tuned!

Labels: book_commentary, lists, projects

Sunday, July 06, 2008
5:24 PM
4 comments

100 book challenge: part four: essays and cultural criticism

Moving on with the 100 Book Challenge, we come to the "essays" area. I don't have a huge selection here, but these would be my picks:

• I Remember, by Joe Brainard
  [Perhaps the simplest organizing principle for a memoir ever: a sequence of sentences, each of which begin with the words "I remember." Yet somehow it works.]
  

• The Size of Thoughts, by Nicholson Baker
  [This book is full of great pieces, including Baker's hilarious review of the Dictionary of American Slang and his lament on the disappearance of the card catalog.]
  

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
  [Not quite as good as the exemplary Consider the Lobster, but I don't have a copy of Lobster—I read the library's copy—and this one is also great.]
  

• I'd also probably bring the giant anthology Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate, which has key selections by people like George Orwell, Joan Didion, M.F.K. Fisher, etc., and thus eliminates the need for a lot of individual volumes.

Essays slide nicely into the critical writing section of my library, so let's head there....

• Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin
  [This book is full of interesting ideas and key essays, but it also has deep sentimental value for me.]
  

• America, by Jean Baudrillard
  [I find the central argument here to be incomprehensible, but in a provocative, distinctly "Baudrillardian" fashion. Like a piece of heady SF in its way. See also his The Gulf War Did Not Happen, which I could part with but which holds similar pleasures.]
  

• Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
  [Probably the key Foucault to hang onto.]
  

• Mythologies, by Roland Barthes
  [And this the key Barthes.]
  

• The Postmodern Condition, by Jean-Francois Lyotard
  [...and this the key Lyotard.]
  

• Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, by Donna Haraway
  [Contains the great Cyborg Manifesto and a number of excellent critiques of the ideological biases inherent to the sciences.]
  

• A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, by Manuel Delanda
  [Between this and Patrik Ourednik's Europeana, one doesn't need any other history books.]
  

• Temporary Autonomous Zone, by Hakim Bey
  [Does this belong in fringe ideas or cultural criticism? It's a little of both, but totally freakin' brilliant. Life-altering.]

Moving on into some more straightforward literary and media criticism...

• Literary Theory, by Terry Eagleton
  [An overview of the main literary theory movements of the last hundred years, written in a style that's clear enough that a bright undergraduate could grasp every word of it.]
  

• Postmodernist Fiction, by Brian McHale
  [A good argument about what postmodernist fiction is, what it does, and why it's doing it. I'd also include Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice here, a similar argument about experimental poetics, but I don't own a copy.]
  

• Half-Real, by Jesper Juul
  [The best piece of video-game criticism I've read to date.]
  

• Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
  [Not exactly a piece of video-game criticism, more a design handbook, but a key text for "game studies" anyway.]
  

• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
  [Yet, oddly, I might pass on McLuhan's Understanding Media, which has not dated especialy well and in some ways is a model for everything cultural criticsm does poorly.]

That's seventeen—and since I'm trying to stick to round numbers for this project I'll include three pieces of fiction I overlooked this first time around: the bizarre Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme, the classic Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and a piece of fun, dense SF, Accelerando by Charles Stross (which I reviewed here.) That brings us to twenty for today, and the running total for the project overall to seventy. I'll move on from the McCloud into the "comics" shelf next.

Labels: book_commentary, lists, projects

Friday, July 04, 2008
11:07 AM
2 comments

100 book challenge: part three: religion, new age, fringe science, and science

Still in the process of [at least theoretically] culling my book collection down to 100 key books. Moving on down the shelf takes us through Drama—my drama selection is pretty patchy and under-appreciated; I'm not sure that any of the scattering of volumes I have would be worth including in the final 100. If I had a good volume of Shakespeare's plays I'd take that, but I don't. Moving on.

The next couple of shelves are religion, "new age"-type stuff, and fringe science. Here are my picks from that area:

• The Grove Press "Pocket Canons" Books of the Bible box set.
  [I should be honest and acknowledge that I'll almost certainly never read the entire Bible, but reading these twelve books every few years is feasible and desirable.]
  

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by Gershom Scholem
  [This book took me forever to get through, but was incredibly rewarding. There are so many strange ideas in the history of Judaism, and this book is a fascinating overview.]
  

• A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
  [Contains just about everything you'll ever need to know about the three major monotheistic religions.]
  

• The I Ching, or Book of Changes (Wilhelm / Baynes translation)
  [Carl Jung claimed that this book was alive. Philip K. Dick claimed that this book could not predict the future, but could rather provide an accurate diagnosis of the present, from which probable futures could be extracted. Anything I could add would be extraneous.]
  

• The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, edited by Lawrence Sutin
  [If anything, Dick's non-fiction is even more interesting and loopy than his fiction. This book contains a lot of Dick's thoughts on spirituality, synchronicity, and reality: great stuff. I'd also find it hard to part with In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, the book that editor Lawrence Sutin valiantly attempted to carve out of Dick's 8,000 page journal documenting his mystical experience.]
  

• Cosmic Trigger Volume One: Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [For better or for worse, Cosmic Trigger changed my life, and although I'm a little more distanced from Wilson these days, this volume is still a real gold mine of high weirdness.]

Let's move on down into the science books...

• Metamagical Themas, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  [Godel, Escher, Bach is more renowned, but this book, which collects Hofstadter's Scientific American columns from 1981-1983, has just as many fascinating ideas, and in more digestible form. Language, self-referentiality, fonts, game theory, geometric art... this thing is like a laundry list of geek interests. Plus it is the book that taught me the game Nomic.]
  

• Emergence, by Steven Johnson
  [A good, readable introduction to the science of complexity and self-organization.]
  

• Chaos, by James Gleick
  [Great pictures of fractals, and still (to my mind) the best introductory book on this particular branch of science. I also own Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which is wonderful to look at, but a bit over my head.]
  

• Li: Dynamic Form in Nature
  [A tiny little book—basically an impulse-buy kind of thing—documenting "surface patterns" in nature—crystal designs, cat markings, vascular structures in leaves, etc. Those are the kinds of patterns I'm attracted to, so this book is pretty important to me. Since it's small, I'll throw in its sister volume, Sacred Geometry, a similar-sized volume on the harmonic mathematics of ritual spaces.]

This brings me right up to the halfway point: 50 books, 50 to go.

Labels: book_commentary, lists, personal

Wednesday, July 02, 2008
10:05 AM
0 comments

100 book challenge: part one: fiction

Here are the first 25 picks, all from the Fiction shelves.

• The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
  [One of my favorite authors, and this is my favorite novel by him.]
  

• Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
  [This book has enough provocative, imaginative ideas in it to last one a lifetime simply by itself.]
  

• The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
  [Still a book I grab on a regular basis to read random passages out loud to people.]
  

• Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
  [Like Labyrinths, this is a book that opens up onto a nearly infinite "possibility space."]
  

• If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino [The other really essential Calvino novel.]
  

• Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
  [A 1928 pornographic novel so mindbending it borders on the Surrealist.]
  

• Crash, by J.G. Ballard
  [If we're bringing along experimental pornography, we should definitely include this.]
  

• Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
  [And this.]
  

• I'm going to cheat here, and count Burroughs' "Cut-Up Trilogy" (Nova Express, Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) as one volume
  

• Another cheat: William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
  

• I actually don't need to cheat on this one, because I have the single volume that collects The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, by Douglas Adams, but it's really the first only the first volume that matters deeply to me. I can, however, see myself enjoying re-reading the others at some point.
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
  [I've still never made it all the way through all three of these, but it's good to bring an unfinished book along with some of the faves, and good to have a book you could feasibly read out loud for a year.]
  

• The Annotated Alice, by Lewis Carroll [annotations by Martin Gardner]
  [Another good out-loud book, plus it's essential to have at least one book on hand that could entertain children. Having Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass together in one volume make this an absolutely indispensible choice. Not to mention the annotations, which are fascinating.]
  

• Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
  [I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever re-read this, but there are some great bits in it that often pop up in my mind, and I'd like to be able to refer to those bits at some point.]
  

• The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon [I'll include Gravity's Rainbow later, if there's room]
  

• Underworld, by Don DeLillo
  [Maybe my favorite "realistic" novel of the last 100 years.]
  

• White Noise, by Don DeLillo
  [Fights with Underworld for the title.]
  

• Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
  [My favorite Amis novel, and the most successful and beautiful extended meditation on the flow of time that I've ever read.]
  

• Blindness, by Jose Saramogo
  [Like Time's Arrow, this is a book that's effectively a fantasy, but nevertheless profoundly captures both the horror and the beauty of real-life humanity.]
  

• Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
  [An experimental novel that's also a concise history of the 20th century.]
  

• Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
  [Or maybe Pale Fire? Whew, tough choice.]
  

• Valis, by Philip K. Dick
  [Far and away the best of his novels.]
  

• My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner
  [An indescribable mish-mash of cyberpunk, experimental poetry, and humor writing.]
  

• Schrodinger's Cat, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [More coherent and more intellectually provocative than the cluttered Illuminatus Trilogy.]
  

• Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
  [A weird but often delightful collection of fantastical short stories.]

Next up: poetry.

Labels: book_commentary, lists

Saturday, June 28, 2008
11:50 AM
2 comments

100 favorite things (2008 version)

Hi there, I'm back.

While away, I did some interesting things (including a one-day vow of silence). But I also did my roughly annual 100-favorite-things list, which, as usual, I'll post here. It is written in long chain of association, which may be decodeable by the astute reader:

• indexes, index cards, card catalogs
  

• taxonomies + lists
  

• notebooks, blank books, composition books
  

• digital search
  

• journals + diaries
  

• weblogs + livejournals
  

• the comic "achewood"
  

• reading
  

• studying
  

• projects
  

• the spring conference
  

• receiving positive attention
  

• giving positive attention
  

• not being bored
  

• feeling competent / feeling powerful
  

• feeling like others perceive me as dangerous / alluring
  

• feeling like others perceive me as caring / kind / nonjudgmental
  

• resisting dichotomies
  

• dancing + dance music
  

• drones + drone music
  

• altered states
  

• listening to music while [in an altered state]
  

• having a beer in the afternoon in an unfamiliar city
  

• travelling
  

• roadtrips with a close friend
  

• the landscape of the american west
  

• forests
  

• trails and hikes
  

• the path between april + thor's driveway and their front door
  

• urban walks
  

• exploring abandoned buildings
  

• tunnels, passages, hidden spaces
  

• mazes + labyrinths
  

• dungeons and dragons + its culture + paraphenalia
  

• games in general: board games, card games, video games
  

• rust, moss, decay, mold
  

• taking photographs
  

• birdsong
  

• the movie "george washington"
  

• the movie "slacker"
  

• conversations
  

• listening
  

• group improvisation
  

• being among a group that is functioning well together
  

• being alone
  

• having ideas
  

• feeling creative
  

• writing
  

• laptop computers
  

• managing my music in iTunes
  

• adobe photoshop + adobe illustrator
  

• del.icio.us, flickr, and other web 2.0-type services
  

• the internet more broadly
  

• katamari damacy
  

• cute shit
  

• the idea of time travel / time travel narratives
  

• grant morrison's comics
  

• the marvel universe + its culture + paraphenalia
  

• jokes and being thought of as funny
  

• fonts
  

• the puzzle-solving elements of graphic design
  

• making everyday activities into a game
  

• self-improvement
  

• receiving recommendations from others
  

• cycles
  

• swimming naked
  

• exhibitionists
  

• touching others
  

• being touched
  

• venus
  

• ganesh
  

• thoth
  

• altars, ritual objects, charms
  

• unitarians + quakers
  

• smokers
  

• greasy spoons
  

• good coffeehouses
  

• free wi-fi
  

• long-form serial narrative
  

• buffy the vampire slayer
  

• subcultures
  

• sleeping next to someone
  

• flirting
  

• long-running relationships
  

• the fundamental variety of other people
  

• sharing food
  

• desserts, esp. ice cream + chocolate
  

• watching movies + having movie-watching projects
  

• being busy buy not feeling behind
  

• having knowledge / the unknown
  

• manipulating data
  

• invented languages
  

• silly songs
  

• coming out of depression / feeling optimistic
  

• epiphanies
  

• good memories / the promise of good things to come
  

• the world
  

More reflections to come in a bit.

Labels: lists, personal

Friday, June 20, 2008
9:24 AM
2 comments

100 favorite things : june 2007

I wonder how many times now I've made these lists. I remember doing the first one in 1991 or 1992.

• positive attention

• giving and receiving affection

• teaching

• thinking through an idea

• writing

• narrative + non-narrative

• poetry + poets

• chapbooks + small presses

• fonts

• graphic design + visual composition

• adobe illustrator + photoshop

• feeling competent

• feeling competent enough to acknowledge the existence of things I still need to learn

• photography

• abstraction

• complex irregular forms

• abandoned buildings + ruins

• taking walks

• trails + hikes

• the woods

• the ocean

• mysticism + devotional practice

• the drone

• making music

• audiomulch

• laptop computers

• itunes + the ipod

• databases + indexes

• index cards

• libraries

• the internet

• del.icio.us, flickr, etc.

• gifts and gift economies

• the spring conference

• letters + journals

• dreams + dreamwork

• the films of david lynch

• stanley kubrick's 2001

• richard linklater's slacker

• ensembles and character networks

• network diagrams

• conversations

• bonfires

• candles

• altars + shrines

• things my friends have made for me

• making things for my friends

• collage

• william s. burroughs

• david foster wallace

• earned sincerity

• playing

• playing games

• rule-systems and constraints

• strategies and plans

• making lists + taking notes

• the boundary line between knowledge + non-knowledge

• BDSM

• collaboration

• taking inspiration from other people's work

• completing a project

• an ongoing project

• dark chocolate

• ice cream

• biscuits + gravy

• diners + greasy spoons

• roadtrips

• mix tapes + mix CDs

• unexpected things discovered while traveling

• vernacular signage

• book darts

• reading

• reading in the bathtub

• keeping a reading log

• blogs + blogging

• zines

• dancing

• feeling confident about my physical appearance / level of desirability

• flirting + the thrill of reciprocated flirting

• jokes + puns

• things that are cute

• Japanese aesthetic systems

• mazes + labyrinths

• dungeons and dragons + its trappings

• graph paper

• new sketchpads

• pigma pens

• the tension between permanence and ephemerality

• "this too shall pass" / "perhaps"

• ecclesiastes

• myths + mythic systems

• paul klee

• mark rothko + the rothko chapel

• robert rauschenberg

• marcel duchamp

• grant morrison

• the marvel universe

• watching movies

• having broad tastes

• not being bored

That's my list. I also love collecting these from other people, so write 'em up and send 'em to me. Or post one to your own blog and send me a link!

In other news: thinking, thinking, thinking, about self-pity, self-loathing, growth, responsibility, desire, love, trust, etc. More soon.

Labels: lists, personal

Friday, June 15, 2007
10:20 AM
0 comments

poets on war

Yesterday I posted a list... today I'm posting a list. Maybe we can make this a thing.

Today's list is books on "US military expansionism" written in the past five years and recommended by the great Juliana Spahr at her blog, Swoonrocket. I've read only two on this list, K. Silem Mohammed's Deer Head Nation and Lisa Jarnot's Black Dog Songs, both are a lot of fun, which is a little bit odd to say about books on US military expansionism, but which is, in fact, true.

Alice Notley, Alma, or The Dead Women

Amiri Baraka, Somebody Blew up America

Barrett Watten, Bad History

Carole Mirakove, Mediated or Occupied

Eliot Weinberg, “What I Heard about Iraq”

Fanny Howe, On the Ground

Judith Goldman, Deathstar/Rico-chet

Jules Boykoff, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge

Rob Fitterman & Dirk Rowntree, War, a Musical

Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, editors, War & Peace 2: Poetry and Essays

Jena Osman, Essays in Astericks

K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation

Kent Johnson, Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz

Kim Rosenfeld, Trama

Kristin Prevallet, Shadow Evidence Intelligence

Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs

Meg Hammell, Death Notices

Drew Gardener, Petroleum Hat

Linh Dinh, Borderless Bodies

Spahr—who wrote one of the best books I read last year— was here in Chicago on Friday, giving a talk at UIC, where I teach. In point of fact she was giving her talk in Room 2028 on a floor where my office is 2026. Despite this I missed the entire talk (I was teaching) and managed to slip in just in time to see the very tail end of the Q+A session. I did at least get to say "thanks for coming." But it still sucked.

Labels: bibliographies, lists, poetics, poetry_commentary, war

Monday, March 05, 2007
9:35 PM
1 comments

books for the game industry

Although I'm not a member of the videogame industry, I very much enjoyed looking at Ernest Adams' list of Fifty Books Everyone In the Game Industry Should Read. There are a few that are game-design-oriented in ways that I can't find relevance in, but only a few: Adams keeps much of the list oriented around theoretical and inspirational texts.

The following are books that I own / have read:

• Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
  

• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
  

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
  

• Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte
  

• Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte (he has a new one out, too)
  

• Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
  

• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
  

• Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  

• Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors (*cough*gygax*cough*)
  

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  

• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
  

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
  

• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray

and the following are the books on Adams' list that I'd like to read, along with intriguing clippings of his descriptions:

• Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
  "Steven Poole is an intelligent and thoughtful writer who understands not only how games work but what they mean, culturally, psychologically, and technically."
  

• Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
  "[E]xamines the complex relationship between rules, which create gameplay, and fiction, which creates fantasy worlds."
  

• Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
  "[Provides] a method of analysis that marries literary theory to information theory."
  

• Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
  "[A] good introduction to the sociology of videogames, placing them in context as a cultural phenomenon."
  

• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee
  "He presents, and argues for, 36 principles of learning that he believes can be found in the design of good games"
  

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
  "Some of the most famous software engineering truisms were first identified by this book, such as 'adding programmers to a late software project will make it even later.'"
  

• A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
  "Christopher Alexander and his team identify dozens of patterns of behavior—not all so dramatic—and show how to enable that behavior through architecture." I've been meaning to read this book for at least five years now.
  

• Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
  "[I]ntroduces a classification for games based on four key qualities found in many of them: competition, chance, simulation ... and what he calls vertigo"
  

• The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
  "Sutton-Smith updates Huizinga and moves the discussion into the modern world."
  

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary, lists

Friday, October 13, 2006
12:30 PM
0 comments

100 favorite things: a project

Part of the reason I posted a new 100 Favorite Things list last week is because I'm participating in a project, over at Flickr, dreamed up by my friend Cathy.

The basis of the project, basically, is to interpret your 100 Things in a series of 100 photos over the course of 2006.

We've got fourteen members at the moment (it's invite-only) and the pool is just starting to collect its first few photos. I haven't posted any yet, because my camera is soon to be traveling with LJM to Tel Aviv, but I might pull some out of the archives to use until she's back.

Labels: lists

Tuesday, February 07, 2006
12:19 PM
0 comments

In a long associative chain:

• lists

• indexes

• the alphabet

• databases and spreadsheets

• the internet

• blogs

• mp3 blogs

• itunes and the ipod

• laptop computers

• taxonomies

• adobe illustrator and photoshop

• photocopiers

• noise (visual and auditory)

• ruins

• patterns

• psychedelia

• (some) drugs (in some circumstances)

• trance states

• drones

• number none

• repetition and variation

• chants

• prayers

• candles

• bonfires

• rituals

• magic

• altars

• grant morrison

• the woods

• the beach

• cities

• chicago

• philadelphia

• new hampshire + vermont

• the spring conference

• costumes and masks

• personae

• writing fiction

• writing poetry

• other people’s writing

• lyn hejinian, rae armantrout

• index cards

• narrative and serial narrative

• joss whedon (esp. buffy the vampire slayer)

• used bookstores and record stores

• libraries

• baths

• coffeeshops

• greasy spoons and diners

• breakfasts

• my dinner with andre

• hal hartley, david gordon green, david lynch

• dreams and dream-working

• sleeping next to someone

• sex

• making out with someone for the first time

• making out with someone who I’ve made out with many times before

• BDSM

• smutty writing

• fantasizing

• body awareness

• games and game design

• decks of cards

• brian eno’s oblique strategies

• divination tools: the i ching, tarot cards

• philip k. dick

• saint sophia

• venus

• thoth

• mystics and mystical texts

• maps

• encyclopedias (including wikipedia)

• collaboration

• improvisation

• collage

• taking photographs

• subcultures

• mix tapes and CDs

• listening to music with someone else

• projects

• william s burroughs

• ben marcus

• charlie kaufmann

• indie comics (note: 100 things I love about comics, here)

• the marvel universe

• handmade packaging

• zines

• getting mail

• writing letters

• making things

• things my friends made for me

• sketchpads

• roadtrips

• travelling and touring

• vernacular signage

• learning something

• teaching something

• students

• the world

Labels: lists

Thursday, February 02, 2006
9:17 PM
0 comments

The meme that's going around in the comics blogosphere at the moment (birthed by Fred Hembeck, believe it or not) is to blog 100 things you love about comics, and since I'm an inveterate list-maker and long-time comics lover I decided why not?:

100 Things I Love About Comics

1. 24-hour comics
2. the Absorbing Man
3. Achewood's Ray Smuckles & Roast Beef
4. Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories : The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics
5. Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve
6. Agatha Harkness
7. Animal Man travelling back in time in Issue #22 and causing glitches in Issue #14
8. the Anti-God decreating the universe very very slowly, in Doom Patrol
9. the archetypal grasslands and talking birds in Anders Nilsen's Big Questions
10. “Assistant Editor's Month”
11. B. Kliban's non-cat-related cartoons
12. Ben Edlund's The Tick
13. Big Numbers #1-2
14. Bill Sienkiewicz's Stray Toasters
15. Bloom County's anxiety closet
16. Bloom County's Steve Dallas
17. Bob the Angry Flower
18. Brian Ralph's Cave-In
19. the Brotherhood of Dada, in Doom Patrol
20. Bugtown, the setting of Matt Howarth's Those Annoying Post Bros.
21. Calvin and Hobbes, especially the Sundays
22. Chris Ware's impossibly complex diagrams and cut-out toys
23. the conceit of Go-Man: keeping the main character in a coma for the first twelve issues of the series
24. the convoluted network of cyborgian family relationships between Henry Pym, Ultron, the Vision and Wonder Man
25. “The Coyote Gospel,” Animal Man #5
26. Craig Thompson's Blankets
27. Dan Clowes' Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
28. the Danger Room
29. The Dark Knight Returns' approach to Superman
30. Dark Phoenix
31. Dave McKean's Sandman covers
32. David Heatley's “My Sexual History (Slightly Abridged Version)”
33. Doonesbury
34. Dr. Doom / Latveria
35. Dr. Manhattan building a palace on Mars in Watchmen
36. Dr. Strange
37. Eddie Griffith's scratchy, terrifying art in From Hell
38. Edward Gorey's Amphigorey
39. Eightball #23, “The Death Ray”
40. the fact that Wolverine was made by Canadians
41. the first two issues of Grant Morrison's Invisibles
42. For Better or For Worse
43. Galactus / the Trial of Galactus / the Ultimate Nullifier
44. Gerhard's backgrounds on Cerebus
45. getting Two-Face to use the I Ching, in Arkham Asylum
46. Ghost World's Enid Coleslaw
47. “Gin makes a man mean!”: Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese
48. How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way
49. Huey Freeman from The Boondocks
50. Iron Man
51. “I did it fifteen minutes ago,” in Watchmen
52. J. Jonah Jameson
53. Jack the Ripper having visions of the 20th century in From Hell
54. Jack Kirby
55. James Kochalka's American Elf
56. James Kochalka's Monkey Vs. Robot
57. Jim Woodring's Frank
58. Jim's Journal
59. John Porcellino's King-Cat Comics
60. the Joker
61. Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte
62. Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
63. the kid from St. Swithin's Day markering “Neurotic Boy Outsider” on his forehead
64. Kitty Pryde
65. Life In Hell, from the 1982-1987 era
66. Little Nemo in Slumberland
67. Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek
68. Magneto
69. Marc Bell's weird Basquiat-ish text-image agglomerations
70. Marvel Team-Up
71. the Negative Zone / Annihilus
72. parodies of the cover of Fantastic Four #1
73. Paul Pope's THB
74. Peanuts' Linus
75. Peanuts' Lucy
76. Phil Foglio's Phil and Dixie
77. Phil Foglio's XXXenophile
78. the physics and internally consistent logic of Larry Marder's Tales of the Beanworld
79. Prohias' Spy Vs. Spy, in MAD Magazine
80. R. Crumb's Zap Comics #1
81. the R. Crumb issues of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor
82. Reed Richards / Susan Richards / Franklin Richards
83. Rick Veitch's dream comic collections Rabid Eye and Pocket Universe
84. the Scarlet Witch's hex magic
85. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics
86. the second half of Church and State
87. Sentinels / Roxxon Oil
88. Sergio Aragones' margin cartoons in MAD Magazine
89. the serial killer convention in Sandman
90. She-Hulk
91. the Silver Surfer
92. “Something fell”: Cerebus
93. Spider-Man
94. stories where characters meet their creators (Animal Man #26, Cerebus haggling with Sim on Pluto, recent issues of Alan Moore's Promethea)
95. Tank Girl
96. Tom Orzechowski's lettering
97. “unstable molecules”
98. Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest
99. What If? / Uatu the Watcher
100. Why I Hate Saturn, by Kyle Baker

I may come back and round out this list with link-annnotations later.

Labels: comics, lists

Wednesday, February 16, 2005
10:34 PM
0 comments

It has been over a year since I last made one of these lists, so here's a new one:

• abandoned spaces

• acoustic guitar

• adobe illustrator & adobe photoshop

• altars & shrines

• audiomulch

• barns

• being introduced to something new

• blogs

• body awareness

• bonfires

• brian eno

• cafes

• card catalogs

• chocolate

• coffee

• collaboration

• collage & juxtaposition

• comics & mini-comics

• consciousness

• corrosion & decay

• cycles

• dada

• databases

• diagrams

• dreams & dream-work

• drones

• effects pedals

• engineered cuteness

• fantasizing

• femininity

• fluxus & conceptual art

• games

• getting letters / writing letters

• grant morrison

• having a conversation

• having a meal with friends

• hooking up with someone for the first time

• hooking up with someone who’s been my lover for a long time

• hybridity & variation

• ice cream

• improvisation

• independent bookstores

• index cards

• indexes

• infinity & paradox

• iTunes & the iPod

• japanese aesthetics

• john cage

• laptop computers

• libraries

• making music

• making things for my friends

• manifestations of the sacred

• minimalism

• mix tapes & mix CDs

• moss & lichen

• my dinner with andre

• noise

• nonmonogamy

• patterns

• pennsylvania & jersey

• platonic affection

• playing centipede at the empty bottle

• plot & narrative

• poems

• public transportation

• pumpkin pie

• reading

• richard linklater’s slacker

• roadtrips

• science fiction

• seasons

• self-referentiality

• sexuality in its million variants

• singing

• spending the night in bed alone

• spending the night in bed with someone

• synchronicity

• taking a bath

• taxonomies

• teaching

• the comfort of habit

• the dictionary

• the dungeon master’s guide

• the golden nugget or other greasy spoons

• the idea of role-playing games

• the idea of zines

• the internet

• the marvel universe

• the ocean

• the spring conference

• the woods

• things my friends made for me

• time machines

• unusual books or bookforms

• venus

• walking

• william s. burroughs

• writing

• xerox machines

Here's the one from 2003 and the one from 2002. I enjoy getting these from other people, too, so if you want to send me one, jeremy (at) invisible-city.com is the address to use, or put it up online somewhere and post a link in the comments section.

Labels: lists, personal

Friday, December 03, 2004
1:29 PM
0 comments

Nick's taxonomy of Internet bookmarks. (This link will load it as a navigable sidebar, very cool.)

Angela's 100 favorite things list.

Labels: lists

Wednesday, January 14, 2004
10:26 PM
0 comments

I've done a list of 100 favorite things at least once a year for over ten years now, as a way of taking stock of good things in my life. I realized this morning that it's been a year since I last made such a list (here's the old one), so I just took the time to make up a new one. Here goes:

1. coffee

2. computers

3. photocopiers

4. thinking

5. spiral-bound index cards

6. reading in the tub

7. cities

8. abandoned buildings

9. graffiti and street art

10. public transportation

11. generative processes

12. experimental music

13. trails and paths

14. roadtrips

15. mix tapes / mix CDs

16. greasy spoons

17. cafés

18. being inside the homes of people I care about

19. inspecting bookshelves

20. word of mouth

21. libraries

22. collections

23. independent bookstores

24. record shopping

25. narrative

26. hypertext

27. the Internet

28. smut

29. sex

30. hooking up with someone for the first time

31. hooking up with someone who’s been my lover for a long time

32. nonmonogamy

33. old friends

34. writing letters / getting mail

35. the spring conference

36. unitarians

37. making music

38. writing

39. drawing

40. sketchbooks

41. pigma pens

42. effects pedals

43. the wire

44. the empty bottle

45. brian eno

46. john cage

47. drones

48. imaginary year

49. collaboration

50. improvisation

51. number none

52. comics

53. board games

54. role-playing games

55. inventing games

56. data visualization

57. japanese design

58. japanese music

59. zen buddhism

60. body literacy

61. cycles

62. hybridization

63. zines

64. novels

65. science fiction

66. david cronenberg

67. david lynch

68. hal hartley

69. jim jarmusch

70. teaching

71. projects

72. things my friends made for me

73. digital cameras

74. corrosion patterns

75. decasia

76. my dinner with andre

77. slacker

78. italo calvino’s invisible cities

79. jorge luis borges’ labyrinths

80. ben marcus’ the age of wire and string

81. information

82. misinformation

83. conspiracy theories

84. collage

85. rubber cement

86. photoshop and illustrator

87. chocolate

88. ice cream

89. eating a meal with someone

90. solitude

91. audiomulch

92. gift economies

93. serialized narratives

94. buffy the vampire slayer seasons 2-6

95. maps

96. seasons

97. taking walks

98. conversations

99. indexes

100. lists
     

I love reading about other people's favorites, so if you want to make me a happy man, make a list like this and send it to jeremy AT invisible-city.com.

Labels: lists

Tuesday, October 07, 2003
10:12 AM
0 comments

I've done a list of 100 favorite things at least once a year now for at least ten years, as a way of periodically taking stock of good things in my life. Recently my buddy Rich posted his, which reminded me that it's been a long time since I've posted one of mine. So here's the most recent one:


1. taking baths
2. my thermos
3. sprial-bound index cards
4. pigma pens
5. new sketchbooks
6. indexes
7. the Web
8. human bodies
9. conversations
10. solitude
11. games
12. mixtapes / mix CDs
13. my CD burner
14. making music
15. writing
16. adobe illustrator & photoshop
17. fonts
18. the photocopier
19. the computer
20. graphic design
21. dada and fluxus
22. john cage
23. brian eno
24. don delillo
25. nicholson baker’s the mezzanine
26. dark chocolate
27. ice cream
28. a celebratory guinness
29. flirting
30. greasy spoons
31. smutty writing
32. cities
33. exploring
34. hidden spaces
35. weathered or overgrown artifacts
36. being deep in the woods
37. public transportation
38. buffy the vampire slayer
39. libraries
40. nonmonogamy
41. independent bookstores
42. record shopping
43. geeks
44. unitarians
45. the spring conference
46. having projects
47. having friends who have projects
48. sitting on the grass in the sun
49. zines
50. weblogs
51. teaching
52. traveling
53. road trips
54. being in other people’s homes
55. shrines
56. the comfort I feel in the presence of the people that I love and trust
57. reading things out loud
58. showing someone something new
59. being shown something new
60. learning
61. the onion
62. richard linklater’s slacker
63. my dinner with andre
64. music from japan
65. stanley kubrick’s 2001
66. keeping a dream journal
67. diaries
68. walking
69. human variety
70. sexuality
71. hooking up with someone new
72. hooking up with someone who’s been my lover for a long time
73. things my friends made for me
74. optimism
75. graffiti
76. drones
77. altered states
78. labyrinths
79. science fiction
80. the wire
81. getting mail
82. working through an idea
83. doonesbury
84. b. kliban
85. jim woodring
86. comics
87. coffee
88. collaboration
89. creative exchange
90. being part of a network
91. word of mouth
92. serialized stories
93. subcultures
94. fall and spring
95. riding my bike
96. paul klee
97. improvisation
98. structure
99. chaos
100. cycles

Labels: lists, personal

Tuesday, October 22, 2002
2:53 PM
0 comments

Recent search terms by which people have found my online serial, Imaginary Year, include:

• hypertext as narrative space
  
• puma monstro
  
• mom i'd like to fuck
  
• yogurt technology
  
• toyo ito
  
• losing your virginity
  
• imaginary poems
  
• cabbagetown and gentrification
  
• gutterpunk chick
  
• attack of the 50 ft woman paper
  
• architecture toyo ito
  
• american spirit cigarettes
  
• bottle fuck
  
• american spirit cigarette
  
• australian survivor theme download
  
• buffy, spike, fuck
  
• corona cervesa
  
• designer vagina
  
• breasts against the glass
  
• downloadable commercials and advertisements about sony
  
• aesthetics of disappearance
  

While this is a reasonably accurate cross-section, I can't help but feel that most of these people were probably disappointed.

Oh God I'm tired.

Labels: lists, meta, personal

Sunday, April 14, 2002
11:37 PM
0 comments

Doing a Google search on "improvised instruments" led me to a whole bunch of pages, none which especially struck my fancy. But I compiled this list of instruments referred to on the various pages.

• washboard
  
• washtub
  
• tea-chest bass
  
• comb and paper
  
• cigar-box fiddle
  
• a drum made from a calabash
  
• a cow's horn
  
• a piece of iron
  
• frying pans
  
• pots and pans, with a wooden spoon as mallet
  
• bells
  
• jugs
  
• bicycle horns
  
• wheel rims
  
• whistles
  
• glass lemon juice bottles
  
• tea container (?) filled with pennies and couscous
  
• fire-hose nozzle ("an amazingly mellow tone," says this Backwoods Home article)
  
• saw
  
• spoons
  
• kettle
  
• tin cans
  
• "rum bottle horns"
  
• garbage cans
  
• an array of empty wine or schnapps bottles
  
• the "ping pong," a small zinc pan
  
• biscuit drum
  
• plastic containers
  
• pieces of wood
  
• strings, reeds, horns, and percussion constructed from discarded gas tanks
  

Labels: artifacts, crafts, lists

Tuesday, February 26, 2002
5:32 PM
0 comments