Best of 2003, According to Me.

(I just want to state that I had planned this before Michael Blowhard suggested it. Nyah Nyah.)

MUSIC

(Oh, and apologies for not linking to everything I mention here, it just would've taken a day and a half. I have linked to the stuff you couldn't easily find yourself at All Music.com.)

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by the Flaming Lips still holds up after all this time (it was released early in the year). Everyone I've gotten to listen to it has become addicted and plays it constantly for the first month. Then, they find it makes it back into the player at least every couple weeks. (I played it twice yesterday.) I'm about to say the most music-snobby thing I ever have, but: I think "Yoshimi" is for music lovers and not dabblers. It's rich, and it's funny. I've noted that true lovers of any art form tend to enjoy - and even understand in the first place or "get" - a humorous addition to the pantheon of classics. Classical music lovers love Mozart's sense of humor in his music. The 2Blowhards are good at pointing out humor in the visual arts that I might have simply chalked up to a mistake on the artist's part. Blah de blah. "Yoshimi" is funny as hell if you really give it a listen. It would seem merely kitschy to a dabbler who gave it a surface listen. But the fact is, the Lips are in on the joke, and there is another layer of jokes to be had if you know that. Even so, nothing else ever recorded (even by the Flaming Lips) sounds quite like "Yoshimi" and nothing probably ever will. It sounds great on a boom box or in the car, but if you can get it on a good stereo in a quiet room (and then crank it!), it blossoms - much like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Oh, and they have just released a DVD 5.1 surround version, if that kinda thing frosts your doughnut. (I'm still undecided whether I like the mucking around they do with the mixes on 5.1 releases, and the fact that most surround speakers don't have the dynamic range of the main two speakers, rendering some parts of the mix tinny or irrelevant.)

For outright straight-ahead rock, no one has made a better rock album than the Foo Fighters' One by One this year. And I still think it's about Anne Rice's vampires.

If you were ever a fan of Chicago, Rhino (now owned by Warner Bros.) has released remastered and expanded versions of their nearly all-classics catalogue. They sound great. Chicago was another of those bands that was wholly unique in its sound - a hard-rocking combo teamed with a bitchin horn section. Like the Beatles, they had the benefit of many excellent songwriters and lead vocalists so one album of theirs is eclectic and varied due to the sheer dint of talent. And, of course, they rocked. (Until their synthesizer period. But hey, I've never felt an artist's misfire somehow mitigated their triumphs.) In case you didn't know this, Chicago is America's most successful band ever, in terms of sales. They rival the Bee Gees and the Beatles in that arena, but since they were never very popular with the critics, and they never got overplayed, you wouldn't know that unless you check out the stats.

The other nice news in music this year is some of the greatest hits CDs put out. If you are an Eagles fan, the new double CD remastered hits package is nearly perfect. No Doubt has a nice solid set, one of those like Tom Petty's or Bob Seger's hit compilations where you can put it on and just push play and everyone will groove along. If you're a fan, Dolly Parton finally put out a decent compilation of her career. She's as guilty as the Rolling Stones for kicking out half-formed collections of her best - probably because music execs didn't think her fans were as eclectic in their tastes as Dolly is in her songs. Oh, and speaking of the Stones, their 40 Licks anthology is decent, though it's missing "Bitch" and "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" in lieu of lesser, newly recorded songs. (The remastering is ace, though. Some of the early Stones remasters were kinda shrill. "40 Licks" sounds fab) Gordon Lightfoot, REM, and The Cure have all put out worthy anthologies as well. Though, if you are a Cure fan, you should get both Staring at the Ocean and Galore, as you will have a more complete set.

TLD: I have always felt Staring at the Ocean's title and imagery came directly from a Dan Hill's 70s chestnut, "All I See Is Your Face". Here're the lyrics:

There's an old man on the corner,
Just staring at the sea,
I want to hold him like a broken doll,
And ask him if he's lonely like me

Which is rich since The Cure were all new wave and edgy, whilst this song is about as 70s maudlin as you can find, right up there with "Wildfire" and " Mac Arthur Park". I find it funny that these guys would take the risk of any Cure fan catching this reference and abandoning the band like a used condom (unless, of course, they are music sluts like me).

Naturally, if the music industry hadn't imploded, lost their collective hive minds, and become nothing but greedheads with no love for music, there would have been many many more on this list. But, music is in the doldrums, so there you have it. (Though there might be cause for hope. I recently discovered they actually show videos on VH1 in the wee hours of the morning. I heard 5 good songs in a row!)


MOVIES

This has been a lackluster year for movies. Nothing really stands out as an enduring classic, and usually there's at least ONE in a year that fits that slot. It will probably be the final installment of The Lord of the Rings since the other two have been splendiferous. The "Matrix" films should have been great, but they were merely good, but not good enough for repeated watchings. However, oh well, anyway, these were ones we (wife, MPC) liked (though "Pirates" was too scary for MPC, so we didn't let her see it):

- Elf - We still hiss "You are on a throne of lies!" to one another around the house with little situational prompting.
- Bruce Almighty - Sweet and funny. Kinda like Oh, God! but different. Bruce instead of John, and Morgan instead of George. Also, it was more self-centered than Oh, God! was, but that's probably just the times. Jennifer Aniston keeps surprising me how she can make characters that don't remind you of Rachel. When she's heartbroken here, it just kills you.
- School of Rock - Ok, maybe I was wrong about the classic thing. This one's a classic. I'll get it on DVD for sure. But then, Linklater is my favorite director these days, so I might be biased.
- Pirates of the Caribbean - This movie would have been pedestrian if Johnny Depp hadn't done that great Keith Richards riff as Pirate Jack Sparrow. And it's overlong by about 20 minutes. It's also nearly got that costume epic funk, but gets around it with Johnny the great, a fantastic feisty heroine, and cute corset jokes.

And, dammit, that's it. Memo to Hollywood and Indie filmmakers: Get on it!

(I haven't seen this Christmas crop, yet, obviously. And I didn't see Kill Bill because I've always been iffy on Tarantino's supposed gifts, nor have I seen Master and Commander as nearly all costume epics bore me beyond endurance and I'm lacking the gender requirements to dig Crowe, so I've relegated them both to DVD rentals.)


BOOKS

- Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This is the book that should replace that dreaded outdated novel that each high school senior has to read in his/her senior English class. Charming, sprawling, shocking, and fun. Plus it has nifty self-referential structural allusions, jokes, and stuff that can be utilized to explain all that kinda stuff to newbie lit students. Outside of all that, it's a great read.
- Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken. I've picked up other books of Franken's before at the bookstore and read a couple pages. He's a funny guy and I was amused, but not amused enough to spend the money or time on what I'd seen so far. In "Lies" he hits his stride; he's hilarious, and I think even wingnuts would laugh out loud at some of the pieces in spite of themselves. It loses lift in a couple places near the end, but if you find your interest in a chapter flagging, just skip to the next one, because there are gems all the way until the end (make sure you don't miss "Supply Side Jesus"). The best section deals with the Clinton administration's evidence and warnings to the Bush administration that a terrorist attack on American soil was imminent - even that Al Queda was behind it - and how it was all ignored. I don't know if the attacks could have been prevented had Bush and the boys pulled their head out of their Jr. High asses and listened, but the evidence seems to point pretty clearly to that possibility. Oh, and unlike a lot of wingnut books, this one not only shows all the references and the research for the facts, it delineates exactly how the facts are stretched in the wingnut books he's critiquing.
- Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland. I've belabored this in previous posts, so I won't again, here. Just, wow.

Most of the other stuff I really liked this year are established authors I've just discovered and reading the back catalogues of ones I've always liked. My new personal discovery Peter Abrahams should be on the bestseller lists with King, Koontz, Nora Roberts, and Grisham, and I have no explanation for why he's not. Douglas Coupland joins Robertson Davies as a Canadian national treasure in literature.

What I did not like is any of the science fiction books I've picked up this year. I sloughed through a recent anthology of "great modern sci-fi" that provided in the intro notes to each story the interesting slant of how it fits in the current overly-political pantheon of current sci-fi writer opinion. Evidently there's this ongoing war of ideas bobbing beneath the surface (like turds in a septic tank) of sci-fi, and it's believed that you have to have the right politics underneath your story to be considered valid by some of more hard-core scribes. (See Orwell's theories on language - or, heck, compare and contrast Fox News to BBC News and so on.)

Well, hell. No wonder most of it sucks. Guys and gals of science fiction: Get over this. No one but you cares about genderless dystopias (or worse, multi-gender dystopias where you may never know the true gender of what you are fucking); perfect Darwinian historical expressions and/or genetically-futzed-with human/animals; science gone so wrong we all wear shapeless gray and tan clothes, shave our heads, have rotten teeth, and have been reduced back to a barter system economy. Aren't you as tired of writing this dreck as we are of reading it? Consider this: Maybe something good will happen in the future. Maybe people LIKE being boys and girls - not to mention human. Maybe there will be neat gadgets, new ideas, great adventures and such in the future rather than a big nanotechnology biomass meltdown. (Nanotechnology will never work anyway. You just watch. If something is so small we can't build a detection system to accurately monitor it, then we can't build it.) Finally, religion is not your enemy. The sooner you grasp that, the better your stories will be.

Oh, and despite Friedrich's nice attempts at explaining Nietzsche (and they were great posts), Nietzsche was still an asshole who simply didn't understand anything about the reality of the human psyche (other than perhaps outlandish wish fulfillment), so anything based on his thinking will fall into the heap of rotting (syphilitic) feces it is. There are many better minds that had much much better ideas.
Like: If we treat others nice, most of them will treat us nice.
And: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
And: I have a dream.

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Update: Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King is amazing. But, like Sya, I think I will wait for the release of the ultra-deluxe expanded edition DVD set of all three movies before I plant the posterior for a penultimate perusing again. I don't think I've seen a movie so full of detail and nuance, yet paced appropriately, in all my days of movie-going. There has never been a movie trilogy as cohesive and consistent in execution and quality, to my knowledge. We have witnessed the creation of a movie classic for the ages. Ain't it cool?