End of the Year Lists

I was thinking about adding graphics and links, but I don't think I'll have a chance until after the New Year. For now, here are some of my favorite records and songs from 2006. I'm not wedded to the orders. Some are just arbitrary. I was never very good at ordering things in terms of favorites, plus that all changes so often, doesn't it? Anyway, here we are.

(expect album art, synopsis, and links to songs soon)

"Post-Rock" and other Instrumental Music

1. Laura- Radio Swan is Down
2. Mono- You Are There
3. Things Falling Apart- We Carry our Fate in Plain Site
4. Mt.- Lethologica
5. Mogwai- Mr. Beast
6. Grails- Black Tar Prophecy
7. Magyar Posse- Random Avenger
8. Kayo Dot- Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue
9. Amanda Handal and GF Seiler- Ghosts and Angels
10. Triosk- The Headlight Serenade

Records I Loved that are not "Post-Rock"

1. Clint Mansell, the Kronos Quartet, and Mogwai- The Fountain OST
2. Thursday- A City By The Light Divided
3. Cursive- Happy Hollow
4. Mates of State- Bring it Back
5. Thom Yorke- The Eraser
6. Cat Power- The Greatest
7. Brand New- The Devil and God are Raging Within Me
8. Man Man- Six Demon Bag
9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Show Your Bones
10. TV on the Radio- Return to Cookie Monster

Honorable Mention

Joanna Newsome- Ys
Yndi Halda (US)- Enjoy Eternal Bliss
Jeniferever- Choose a Bright Morning
Gotan Project- Lunatico
When They Know You They Will Run- s/t
Russian Circles- Enter
Battles- ep c/ b ep
Jakob- solace
Te'- naraba, imi kara kaihou sareta hibiki ha "oto" no sekai no shinen wo kataru.
Giants will fall- a state of nervous excitement
Because of ghosts- The Tomorrow We Were Promised Yesterday
Bent- Intercept
Ascent of everest- how lonely sits the city
The knife- Silent Shout
Appleseed Cast- Peregrine
Boy Sets Fire- The Misery Index; Notes from the Plague Years
The Most Serene Republic- Phages
Helios- Eingya
Natsumen- NEVER WEAR OUT yOUR SUMMER xxx !!!
Souvenir's Young America- Virginia

Top Singles

Instrumental

1. Clint Mansell- Death is the Road to Awe
2. Laura- It’s kind of like the innocent smiles you get…
3. Mogwai- glassgow mega-snake
4. Mono- the flames beyond the cold mountain
5. Mono & WEG- Untitled 5
6. Magyar posse- Whirlpool of Terror and Tension
7. Tristeza- en nuestro desafio
8. Helios- Bless This Morning Year
9. Gotan Project- Differente
10. giants will fall- from here on in
11. adriam klumpes- weave in and out
12. a lily- I am to you
13. yndi halda- Illuminate My Heart, My Darling
14. Grails- Stray Dogs
15. Appleseed Cast- mountain halo
16. because of ghosts- so quick
17. ascent of everest- a threnody
18. things falling apart- odessa
19. Amanda Handal and GF Seiler- the lure
20. Jenniferever- swimming eyes

Rock and non-insrumental

1. Cat Power- Living Proof
2. Thom Yorke-Cymbal Rush
3. Man Man- Engwish Bwudd
4. Nelly Furtado and Timbaland- Maneater
5. Thursday- Running from the Rain
6. Gnarls Barkley- Crazy
7. Boy sets fire- with cold eyes
8. Brand New- degausser
9. Yeah yeah yeahs- cheated hearts
10. Tv on the radio- playhouses
11. Gorillaz- Kids With Guns / El Mañana
12. Damien Rice- 9 crimes
13. The Knife- We Share Our Mother's Health
14. The Most Serene Republic- you're not an astronaut
15. The Delays- valentine
16. Emily Haines- detective's daughter
17. bent- the handbrake
18. The Appleseed Cast- Mountain Halo
19. Broken Social Scene- Puff The Magic Dragon
20. cursive- bad sects

Presents under the Bodhi Tree

A buddhist at X-Mas

"The Winter Solstice

Of course the origins of Christmas long pre-date Christianity. The majority of the world's religions originated in relatively low latitudes (around 30�N) where the difference in day length between Summer and Winter is not particularly noticeable. However, for us folks who live further from the equator, the long dark nights and short dull days of midwinter are definitely a big psychological issue. That is why the Winter solstice has always been of such importance to Northern Europeans. It symbolises, if not the rebirth, at least the conception of the new year. In the Celtic calendar Imbolc (Candlemas) was the actual birth of the New Year, with the appearance of the first lambs and green shoots.

The early church failed to suppress the solstice celebrations and instead adopted them (much as they planted churches on pagan sacred sites), overlaying the scarcely concealed Druidic symbolism with Christian attributes. There is actually no historical evidence that Jesus was born on the 25th December.

The Celtic annual cycle of Imbolc, Halloween and Winter Solstice offers a rich source of symbolism and analogy for the process of rebirth, life, death, bardo and conception that would not be as apparent in traditional Buddhist countries, which are mostly at lower latitudes. So it is likely that as Buddhism continues to spread in the Anglo-Celtic cultural areas, it will adopt some of the Winter Solstice customs. There is no reason for in not to do so, for it is often remarked that unlike most other religions, Buddhism is not tied to a particular culture. It is effective for any sentient being, anywhere, any time."

im Geist

This is a link to my Amazon Wishlist. When not arguing and pontificating, in addition to wasting time on the internet, I spend most of my time trying to better myself and/or maing art. As a result, most of the things I own are musical intruments, recording equiptment, music, and books. Amazon happens to be a great way to get music and books. I figured it couldn't hurt to get my list out there. If anyone feels like being generous, in the spirit of giving, I'd be very appreciative.

At first glance, the stuffed Saint Nick looks a bit like a farmer’s scarecrow –– arms stretched wide, looming over a field. At second glance, that field sits empty and yes Virginia, that’s Santa nailed to a cross.
Wright, a Berkeley-educated economist turned painter, says Santa Claus represents an unbridled consumer culture that only becomes amplified and hysterical during the Christmas season.

“The season transcends just receiving a bunch of stuff,” Wright said. “This is a season that is supposed to be festive and happy, where you get together with your family. It’s supposed to be a season of joy, but they have turned it into a commercial orgy.”

Wright, 69, says he was raised Catholic, but doesn’t subscribe to any religion. He and his wife Pattie Cook don’t exchange gifts but celebrate Christmas with a big dinner with family and friends.

___________________


Check it out. Merry X-Mas kiddos.


PS Everyone here knows why we shorten Christmas to X-Mas, right? I didn't think so. Many people think the 'X' is related to the cross, or that the shortening is a 20th century phenomenon. Wrong and wrong. You see, the word 'christians' comes from the Greek, Χριστός Khristós which means "anointed one," which is itself a translation of the Hebrew word Moshiach (Hebrew: משיח, also written "Messiah"), (and in Arabic it is pronounced Maseeh مسيح). The disciples of Jesus of Nazareth were first called as such in Antioch, according to Acts 11:26. In Greek, the letter Χ, pronounced Chi, (CH-eye), is related to the Roman letter 'X.' Thus early on, Christians, or Χριστιανός (Khristianos) and variant Χρηστιανός (Khrestianos) were known as X-tians.

anna

First of all, I'd like to say it is interesting that Time's person of the year is "you," of course alluding to YouTube. I'm glad I wrote my last entry when I did. Aren't I prescient? Haven't read the article yet, but YouTube was also their invention of the year, so I have some idea where they're going with this.

In other, related rants, I am deeply distrubed by the state of our culture. What else is new, right? I don't think we need government to regulate or anything like that, I just wish more people were criticizes the status quo, thinking about what they value, questioning in general. Uncertainty is a good thing.

Let me tie these two things together. Earlier I noted that I feared we, as a culture, were loosing our ability to make sound aesthetic judgements, that we may in fact be in the process of forgetting that such a judgement is valid. I recently came across a 19 year old girls blog. She is one of many who idolizes silly tarts like Lindsay, Paris, Nicole, Mischa, etc. She glorifies anarexia, her #1 interest is losing weight, she counts her calories (300 a day?) and her target weight is 85lbs. This is the flipside of obese America. Many Americans are terribly unhealthy, overweight, and have attrocious diets. Others are ridiculously obsessed with working out, eating healthy, 'organically,' blah blah. Most people are superficial, interested in material fashion, trends, exercise and diet fads, cosmetic surgery, and in general paralysed by a fear of death. Few people think about this, and thus our cultural anxiety over death is simmering under the surface of it all. What do we value? Survival. Youth. Material things. What are these worth if our culture has become so destructive and deriviative? Back to the point, these incredibly sick girls are the flip side. We, as a culture, seem disgusted by fat people. They embody laziness, lack of self-control, excess. They are almost openly made fun of in mass media. These poor girls, however, miss the point. Moderation is the key. I will not post any links at this point, but if you're interested, do a search for pro-ana, or just browse through teenagers blogs. It's scary. I think I'll write an article on this. Just my initial shock, but I don't think it's going to fade.

youtube

I'm feeling very ambivalent towards youtube these days. Since google decided to buy the less-than-year old phenom, I've been pondering it's uses and it's new found role in our culture.

On one hand, it has changed everything, giving us access to millions of videos, adding context to news blogs, magazines, etc. We can watch old episodes of favorite shows, see why Jack Black is funny, or replay a particular scathing opinion piece by Keither Olbermann, or a funny bit by Stephen Colbert. Slate.com is infinitely more interesting with links to outside context such as videos on youtube, and is an excellent example of how the web can be harnassed by future journalists, and may just be how the industry adapts and finds its place in the future. We also have been given the ability to make millions of home made videos, some of which are histerically funny, creative, and worth sharing.

The downside that I've realized is that our culture has almost completely lost our ability to tell good from bad. We can surely voice our opinion, many do so quite rudely in fact, but this isn't quite what I'm getting at. As a culture, we have now allowed lonelygirl and "hey kid I'm a computer" become prominent members of our shared culture. These may fade quickly, but to be replaced by what? When Andy Warhol stated that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, I don't think he really knew how right he would be. This raises several more questions. Do we really need access to all this information? Is it worth it? More has been produced in the last 50 years, in terms of writing and music, than in all of history prior to that. At this rate, who knows, maybe in the last 10 years! It's going to get to a point where the overabundance of crap completely kills our ability to make aesthetic judgements. This is scary, but I don't think that most of us can even comprehend such a thing. We're all already tained, myself included. It is heartening to see the masses take control of distribution and production, making films music (and blogs), yet at the same time disheartening, as most of us are turning out shit which will eventually choke us all.

The etimologically, the word fame descneds to us from the ancient Greeks, and was meant to refer to those whose memory would outlast them. Heroes, such as Achilles, Hector, Ajax, great thinkers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato, etc. Simply being well-known during ones life, essentially running in large social circles, is not 'fame' in the true sense. This is worth keeping in mind. The cult of celebrity, in large part a cultural reaction to techinology, has merely appropriated motion pictures and mass-market print to serve the function religion/myth once served. These celebrities, like our art, are temporary. On some level, Alan Bloome is correct. (I think we should diversify the cannon to include eastern classics as well, such as the Tao te Ching, the I Chine, the Vedas, the poetry of Rumi, Basho, master Dogen's writings, etc, but should focus on works who have established their literary worth.) There is something to be said for any work which can survive for centuries. Of course many great works have been lost for a variety of reasons, but I doubt very much that anything has survived that shouldn't have. This is of course a tricky thought-experiment, as any work which has survived for so long has surely influenced our culture and thus we are too biased to judge whether something 'should' or 'shouldn't' have survived. But that's sort of the point, no?

So, to conclude this rant, although I think there is great potential for distribution via the internet sans the corporations, I am fearful that the flood of crap being produced by the masses will so deteriorate our culture that we will no longer be able to recognize that such a thing as good and bad even exist as objective classifications of aesthetic worth.

More Fountain Stuff

Aside from Clint Mansell's magnificent score, which I had the privalege of hearing before I saw the film, the unique nature of the f/x in the film was one of the factors that peaked my interest and got me excited and interested in the Fountain. Aronofsky stated that CGI, such as that used in (every film made following) the Matrix, can quickly look dated, whereas a film like Kubrik's 2001: a Space Odyssey still looks stunning and timeless. Like 2001, the Fountain is not a conventional sci-fi film, nor is Aronofsky a 'sci-fi' director, if there is such a thing. Both films tell us about ourselves and how we ought to live now. 2001 examined our relationship, as human beings, with technology, and the Fountain explores our fear of death. Eastern religion and philosophy, particularly Buddhism, is, in my opinion, much more open and healthy in their understanding of life and death, and in that way more advanced. Our basic value systems in 'the West' revolve around a fear of death; we indulge in our vanity and seek to live longer (although we have stopped trying to better ourselves and focus only and having and possessing material objects, facts, bodies, etc. ) Point being that Aronofsky and his colaborators found a way to make the Fountain look unique, in additon to embracing a style of f/x that is in harmony with the message of the film and the philsophy of the production team. The principles which govern the universe, whether you call it logos, the Tao, physics, or God, work on the infinite just as it works on the infintesimal.

"... Aronofsky's team discovered the work of Peter Parks, a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London. Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks' technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. "When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you're looking at infinity," he says. "That's because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space." Read more, from an article in Wired

The Fountain, again

So as my readers (if I have such a thing) may know, I was very impressed by Darren Aronofsky's new film, the Fountain. Although it has been billed as a sci-fi love story which spans the ages, the film is really nothing of the sort. It is visually beautiful, inovative, non-linear, poetic, and features a soundtrack that will haunt the viewer, and is likely the best of the year. The film is divided into three, and plays with imagery, metaphor, symbols, and circles. Rachel Weiss plays two characters, Queen Isabella, and Izzie; one a Queen who seeks eternal youth, the other a present-day writer, who has accepted death as necessary to life. "Death as an act of creation....death is the road to awe." Anyway, the film is stunning and sends a much needed message to our modern culture obsessed with youth, scared of death, and intent on merely surviving instead of living. It is ironic that near death experiences are the closest many people will come to really experiencing living.

Here is a link to some excellent artwork that Aronofsky had commissioned by a wide array of artists.

NYT Page, Artwork

The Fountain, again

So as my readers (if I have such a thing) may know, I was very impressed by Darren Aronofsky's new film, the Fountain. Although it has been billed as a sci-fi love story which spans the ages, the film is really nothing of the sort. It is visually beautiful, inovative, non-linear, poetic, and features a soundtrack that will haunt the viewer, and is likely the best of the year. The film is divided into three, and plays with imagery, metaphor, symbols, and circles. Rachel Weiss plays two characters, Queen Isabella, and Izzie; one a Queen who seeks eternal youth, the other a present-day writer, who has accepted death as necessary to life. "Death as an act of creation....death is the road to awe." Anyway, the film is stunning and sends a much needed message to our modern culture obsessed with youth, scared of death, and intent on merely surviving instead of living. It is ironic that near death experiences are the closest many people will come to really experiencing living.

Here is a link to some excellent artwork that Aronofsky had commissioned by a wide array of artists.

NYT Page, Artwork

Legally Mandated Desegregation

This is a hot-button issue, obviously, and one which is currently being debated by the Supreme Court. I have conflicting opinions. Race is a social construct, not something biological. This is a fact. Discrimination is real, however, and when this discrimination is used to negatively deny people oppurtunities, it is the place of government to ensure that such discrimination not be legal. How can 'racial balance' solve any of the problems in our schools? This skirts the issue, and posits the very difference the legislation is intended to deny. I feel that all racial legislation should be dropped. The job of the government isn't to level the playing feild or make sure that discrimination doesn't happen socially; discrimination (that is the ability to make distinctions between one group and another based on association, affiliation, ethnic origins, religion, etc) is a necessary and inherant componant of social life. It is in the political sphere (which is now unfortunately and possibly irreversabley intertwined with the social and economic spheres) that the body politic function, and it is their job to ensure that such discrimination isn't legally enforced. They cannot, however, force it to happen, just remove legal opstacles keeping oppurtunity unbalanced. For example, if a man wishes to marry another man, or woman a woman, the government should not be able to prevent this, as citizens should have equal rights, and marriage is a private matter.. Such a union is a personal choice and is one which is in the private sphere of one's home and is not the business of the government. (I imagine most of my readers are somewhat in agreement. The government has no place in telling a religious institution to honor said marriage, but again, the legal barrier must be removed.) Now if this occurs, should the government forcably marry gay men and women? In the case of marriage, this make's no real sense, yet with schools, we feel the need to desegregate and racially balance. I am all for desegregation, but it must be based on social and economic factors. We need to address the problems at hand perpetuating the system and these problems are not directly political. Racial segregation is not legal, and hasn't been for half a century, yet we still live in a largely segregated country, despite efforts to desegregate. Why is this? Progress has been made, but the real economic and social problems haven't been adressed. Every school in the state should have the same curriculum, and every student in the state should have the same amount of money spent on them. A federal office should recommend curriculums, but I don't think a country as big as ours, and founded on the principles that our Republic were founded on, should be or would be able to mandate a unified system. But perhaps, if the judiciary wants to get involved in our schools, they should start by funding every school equally. Perhaps it would cost billions of dollars. Maybe 10's of billions. But in a country where NASA gets $17 billion per year, and half our nation budget is designated for military costs (no even including the war in Iraq and Afganistan, which adds to the figure) we can surely find a way. Why is acceptable to bankrupt our country for militarism but not education? This is threatening to turn into a long Joe-rant about everything, so I'll end with a popular paraphrase by Socrates, from Plato's Gorgias; It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.