I’m an English major in college going into the second semester of senior year. Aside from the horrifying notion of having to find a real person job and that I’ll be done with being a student in a few months, this also means that I have to write the dreaded senior thesis. I’ve been putting kind of a lot of thought into this over the past three years, because it’s very easy to view a 35-50 page paper you write at the end of your college career as the “Well, this is what I learned as an English major. I promise it was worth it!” paper.

So, naturally, I’ve discarded a lot of dumb ideas.

Word of God vs Authorial Intent: Outing Gay Characters In Harry Potter and Earthbound

There’s this thing in literary theory and interpretation called “the intentional fallacy”, which is a fancy way of saying that just because the author says something about what their work means, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. The reasoning behind this is because the meaning of a work could be greater or lesser than the author’s intentions. For example, let’s say that the author of a book says that this one scene has a tree and that tree represents a penis.

We’re going with really stereotypical examples here.

Just because it’s their work, that doesn’t mean this interpretation is correct. Someone could read the work and come up with another interpretation where the tree serves as a symbol of lost innocence, recurring throughout the work, and realize a greater meaning to the tree than the author ever conceived. Alternatively, someone could read the work and argue convincingly that the tree was just a tree and there’s more significant things going on.

Basically my point here is that just because the author offers some analysis, that doesn’t mean it’s true. But what about when, instead of explaining deeper meanings, they just reveal information not disclosed in the work? Like outing gay characters.

Because we have no chance of deducing this ourselves.

It’s not strictly analytical, but if there’s nothing in the work explicitly stating this, is that really any different? It’s still a reading of the text, taking information that’s in the work and interpreting it to scratch beneath the surface. So does J.K. Rowling’s statement after the last Harry Potter novel had been published that Dumbledore is gay fall victim to the intentional fallacy? Searching for another example, we have the 1994 video game Earthbound and the character Tony.

And if this part of the game didn’t make you sad, you’re a jerkface.

Tony’s sexuality is never discussed in the game (as he’s something like eleven years old, like most of the main characters in the game), but years later the game’s creator Shigesato Itoi stated that Tony is gay. This tends to be accepted as canonical information about the character, however, revealed through a term known as “the word of God”. Is this the same thing as the intentional fallacy, though?

Of course, this is so open to debate that this is basically an impossible paper to write, since it’s just discussing the boundaries of theory, analysis, interpretation, and all kinds of other critical messiness.

Also I was probably only interested in writing this because I’m still pissed J.K. Rowling couldn’t just write that Dumbledore was gay at any point in the fucking books. The whole series is thousands of pages long; how hard could that have been? She could have made such a strong, progressive statement but noooo. Sure, she can say Dumbledore is gay and most people will be aware of it, but over time, how well is this information going to be known in the future if it’s nowhere in the books?

“How Should I Know What Fooly Cooly Is? I’m Still In Grade School!”: Absurdist Coming of Age in FLCL

I first watched FLCL in my junior year of high school and never knew something so nonsensical could make so much sense. It’s kind of hard to explain, but basically FLCL (pronounced “Fooly Cooly”) is a coming of age story about a boy named Naota who, although he acts much older than he is, is still very much clinging onto his childhood.

Also, (spoilers) it’s set in the middle of an intergalactic war between an organization attempting to defend the earth from an extraterrestrial corporation named Medical Mechanica that “flattens” worlds and has somehow also captured a powerful alien named Atomsk who has the ability to instantly transport anything across the universe, who an alien named Haruko is attempting to free, apparently working for another extraterrestrial party, but by the end it is revealed that all along she only wanted to free him to gain his powers for herself and along the way, she interferes in Naota’s life and relationships with his family and his semi-expatriate older brother’s ex-girlfriend that now he’s sort of dating, using them as pawns to progress her plan, such as exploiting Naota’s previously unused ability to transport solid matter instantaneously through his head, such as robots.

It’s all pretty straightforward.

Anyway, let’s focus on the subtle coming of age story.

I’ve written pretty extensive analyses on FLCL for this blog before, and it’s a lot of fun. But I think it would be really fun to do an academic analysis of it and discuss how the show uses absurdism to create one of the most nuanced and engrossing coming of age stories I’ve ever seen. The show regularly stretches the boundaries of realism, and even its own previously stretched realism, and I think it’d be really fun to analyze what sort of statement and environment this makes for a coming of age story.

As just one example, here’s a scene with the character Amarao, who serves as something of an older version of Naota: obsessed with his adult state, but incapable of letting go of his childishness. Pay attention to the absurdism here, how the art style constantly shifts between a refined and detailed style with an authoritative and knowledgeable Amarao and then to a cruder, more whimsical (and South Park-esque) art style where Amarao bickers about his haircut in a high-pitched voice, describing something that looks more adult without really describing anything, and then rattling on further about candy.

Furthermore, and what I find really interesting about the whole thing, is that the absurdism allows these to take place at the same time. These two different sides of Amarao actually take place simultaneously, in that we’re not shifting back and forth between two different realities or scenes or anything, this is all in sequence and in a context where this reality-bending fits. It’s like seeing multiple sides from one side, like Picasso’s Weeping Woman. This sort of stuff happens all the time in FLCL, and it is fascinating.

God, I hope this metaphor makes sense.

Of course, the problem with this as a senior thesis for the English major could be seen in that last clip: the work you write on has to have been originally written in English. Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.

I’m In Lesbians With You: Scott Pilgrim as an Analysis of Breaking Up and Moving On and Every Other Type of Relationship

I kind of love the movie Scott Pilgrim versus The World way too much. I’ve watched this movie while in a relationship, after a breakup, and just plain single with nothing interesting happening any which way. While I take issue with a lot of the movie (Ramona doesn’t really seem to care about Scott, the “It was just a phase” joke about a character’s sexual orientation, how it kind of gets boring towards the end), I do think it offers a really interesting insight into relationships. Scott’s trying to get over an ex-girlfriend, trying to feel comfortable in a new one, trying not to hurt a rebound anymore than he already has, dealing with his ex-girlfriend moving on, and dealing with his current girlfriend’s exes. The last point, of course, would seem to be the premise of the movie, since the idea is that Scott has to defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes. So that’s the most obvious metaphor, but the tension from the rest of it is absolutely fantastic too.

This is such a deliciously awkward scene for anybody who’s ever known people.

Much like FLCL, what would make this worth analyzing is the absurdism. The way the film plays around interchangeably with realism and fantasy is a lot like that “seeing two sides from one side” thing I was talking about with the hypothetical FLCL paper. Scott literally defeats Ramona’s exes in combat whereupon they explode into piles of coins. The video game metaphor as a means through which Scott comes to terms with the people in his life and, finally, himself seems like it would be fun analyzing.

But not enough where I’d actually want to do it.

Something About The Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas

It’s no surprise to anybody who reads this blog that I’m obsessed with The Mountain Goats.

My favorite album, All Hail West Texas, has a very simple cover. It’s just text saying the name of the artist, the name of the album, and the description “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys”. And as much as I love this album and probably know most of the words by heart, so far as that description goes: sure? I gotta be honest, I have a really hard goddamn time trying to piece this album’s story together. I know it’s only a loose concept album, but I have a really hard time figuring out which songs are supposed to be about which people. Hell, I don’t think I could figure out which seven people John Darnielle is singing about in which songs.

Of course, the problem with this is that I have no idea what I’d write about. This isn’t an analysis, this would just be a bunch of close reading. As much as I love Darnielle’s writing, I got nothing for how I’d actually write an English paper on it.

The Social Commentary in and the Methodology of  Satire and Children’s Literature: Or, A Goddamn Thesis About Both Oscar Wilde and Dr Seuss

Except wait this is actually what my senior thesis is.

I’m insane.

Inspired by A Softer World photographer Emily Horne’s list at the beginning of the year of all the films she watched in 2011, I decided it might be fun to do so too! Yes, sometimes I work on blog posts for a very long time. Asterisks mean it was a rewatch, which will probably be the majority of these. So here’s a bunch of movies! Yay!

1. Inception*
   You know what’s fun? Watching this on a whim with your flatmates at 2am over a few cups of tea with Jack Daniel’s. Makes it all a bit stranger.
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1*
   I watched Part 1 because Part 2 came out on DVD but I was in England and my family’s copy of the movie was in America and I didn’t want to buy it myself so I had to watch Part 1. First world problems.
3. Anonymous
   A fairly blah “what if Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare?!” but with incest.
4. Six String Samurai*
   This makes for a fucking weird date movie.
5. Henry V
   Kenneth Branagh. And that’s about it.
6. The Descendents
   It’s not Up In the Air, but it’s still pretty good. Actually, I think it mostly just made me want to watch Up In the Air again.
7. The Artist
   The plot was a bit straightforward, but I’m so in love with the “silent movie made in 2011″ idea that I’m pretty okay with it winning Best Picture. Actually, I’d have given it Best Picture for the nightmare sequence alone. Hell, I’d have given it Best Picture for the dog alone. UGGIE IS THE GREATEST.
8. Carnage
   Christ, this was weird.
9. Zoolander*
   HANSEL IS SO HOT RIGHT NOW.
10. Aladdin*
    Some of my flatmates and I did a Disney movie marathon night. We watched two movies. Aladdin still totally holds up.
11. Hercules*
    Because Hercules didn’t drink the last drop of the potion, he retained his godlike calves.
    
12. Clerks*
    Oh, Kevin Smith and your love-it-or-hate-it excessively loquacious dialogue. Who talks like this? Doesn’t matter, I love this movie.
13. The Room*
    Bad movie nights, man. That’s where the party is always at.
14. The Help
    I thought this was a fantastic movie, although a friend later pointed out that a good bit of it is fairly problematic, like the white person coming in to save the black community, and how it completely ignored the threat these women faced from sexual assault. All fair points, but I still think it’s a pretty powerful film.
15. Mean Girls*
    One time Regina George punched me in the face. It was awesome.
16. Hugo
    It was cute, but incredibly underwhelming. Apparently this kid’s going to be Ender Wiggin in the finally actually happening Ender’s Game movie. I guess that’s a bit promising. Also, Sacha Baron Cohen is in here, actually being family friendly. That’s weird.
17. Garden State
    Never saw this before, but always wanted to because I was curious how well Zach Braff worked as a writer/director/lead actor. Fell rather short of my expectations. Some of it was ridiculously stupid, but there were also a lot of genuinely brilliant bits.
18. Legally Blonde
    I laughed.
19. The Muppets
    Holy shit, the cameos in this movie are almost as hilarious as the movie itself.
    

    Part of me wishes Dave Grohl actually played Animal.

20. The Godfather*
    I watched this in a small dorm room with about twenty other people who wouldn’t shut up. This is a bad way to watch movies.
21. Psycho*
    My absolute favorite horror movie of all time ever. So much that when I came back drunk from a party at 2am and was having a Twitter conversation with one of my friends back in the states, five hours back, who said that they were going to watch this movie for the first time, I demanded to watch it with them on Skype. In case anybody’s wondering if it’s a good idea to stay up until 4 or 5am watching a horror movie via screen share on Skype after coming back drunk from a party, the short answer is “no, not particularly”.
22. Rear Window*
    But then a few days later we watched Rear Window at a more appropriate time for both of us because I also love Rear Window (my friend had just discovered Hitchcock and was watching a bunch of his movies for the first time and I was making suggestions). Since I was sober this time, I noticed that the whole screen share thing is not really the best way to go about watching a movie. Fortunately I have seen this a million times because, as I said, it is amaaaaaaziiiiiiing (even if the end is a bit anticlimactic).
23. The Hunger Games
    So I totally went and saw this on my own because all my friends were out of town and I had nothing else to do. Making things even more embarrassing, the guy tried to subtly get me the under-19 discount, but I was already adamantly “I AM A TWENTYSOMETHING AND SEEING THE HUNGER GAMES BY MYSELF. JUDGE ME IF YOU WISH, I CARE NOT”. And so I didn’t get the discount.
24. The Dark Knight*
    I actually hadn’t seen this since it was in theaters. I still insist Batman Begins is better, but this is probably one of the best sequels ever.
    
25. Driving Lessons*
    It’s not a great movie. It’s not really even a good movie. But there’s a few scenes in here that I remembered really resonating with me, and so I watched it again to see if those few scenes justified having it on my favorite movies on Facebook even though it’s a very mediocre movie I only watched one time. The answer: nobody really cares what your favorite movies are on Facebook.
26. The Room*
    As sad as it is that I’ve seen this movie eight times, it’s even worse that three of those were sober.
    

    Sobriety is the sort of thing that makes scenes like this rather difficult to watch.

27. Scott Pilgrim vs The World*
    Yeah, I still have a hard time buying that Ramona actually gives a shit about Scott or that they have any kind of chemistry, but even rewatching this movie it’s still fucking amazing, which is impressive, given my loathing of Michael Cera.
28. Pulp Fiction
    Not that the whole movie wasn’t wildly entertaining, but, man, the ending makes this movie.
29. Kick-Ass
    It got off to a slow start and I have some serious issues with almost every single characters’ motivation, but this was nice.
30. Scott Pilgrim vs The World*
    Don’t judge me.
31. The Avengers
    Oh my God, this was amazing! Yay Joss Whedon!
32. Cabin in the Woods
    OH MY GOD, this was AMAZINGER! Yay Joss Whedon!
33. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Much like the tv show, it was roughly two thirds awkward uncomfortable and one third absolutely hilarious. Which is fine for a half hour tv show, but for an hour an a half movie, that ratio got pretty rough. It took a long time to get going, but I thought it was a fitting end to the series. The “Is this kind of gay?” “No, no, it’s… decadent!” sequence made me laugh so much I actually had to pause the movie.
    

    Although I’ve never wanted to punch a fictional character in the face more than Simon in this movie.

34. The Lucky One
    Sometimes you sleep in really late and feel like if you don’t get out of your flat as soon as possible, you’re going to feel terrible all day. Sometimes as soon as you think this, some of your friends contact you saying that they’re going to see a movie but it’s a chick flick but thought they’d ask if you’d like to go anyway, and you think “Well, I guess that’s going to happen, then.” As for the movie itself, I looked it up on Wikipedia, read the first three words of the plot summary, which were “Logan (Zac Effron)”, and gave up there and went in completely blind. Two of my friends were in the mood for something sappy and emotional and enjoyed it for that. My other friend and I (the one that I run Bad Books Good Times with, actually!) wanted to laugh at a chick flick and we were cracking up during the movie at increasingly inappropriate times, like when the two romantic leads are about to kiss for the first time and Zac Effron’s character has a terrible line and we just lost it. So I enjoyed it, but not the way I was supposed to, if my other friends’ glares are indicative of anything.
35. The Avengers*
    Yes, I did go see it again.
36. Troll 2*
    I saw Troll 2 once with a bunch of my friends for a bad movie night, and, sure enough, the movie was so bad that we drank so much that nobody remembered that Grandpa Seth had lightning powers. After that, I tried watching it with a different group of friends, but without alcohol, and we gave up after fifteen minutes and deemed it unwatchable sober. So this time I showed it to some friends I made while studying abroad in England and made sure that everybody had enough alcohol. Two people had to be walked home after the movie, which turned into a 4am trip to Tesco, and then we watched the sunrise. Best. Bad Movie Night. Ever. Also, uh, drink responsibly.
37. Pokemon: The First Movie
    We watched this after Troll 2 at the same bad movie night because my friends were shocked that I had never seen it before, but we were already all quite drunk. So basically all I remember is that we decided that all of Mewtwo’s problems came from his self-image because his thighs were so big.
    

    Please drink responsibly.

38. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*
    I like this one.
39. Serenity
    After seeing The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods in roughly the same week, I realized that I really needed to see the rest of Joss Whedon’s stuff, and first on that list was Firefly, which the internet had been telling me to watch for roughly forever. So I watched all of Firefly and while I thought it was very enjoyable, I was a bit underwhelmed, which I blame largely on the internet over-hyping it. Serenity did a fantastic job of wrapping up the loose ends. I absolutely love how the River storyline intersected with the Reavers storyline at the end, and although I was expecting quite a few deaths, I wasn’t ready at all for Wash’s death, but it was handled very well. Aside from that, my biggest complaint is Book’s unexplained miniscule role and horribly anticlimactic death. After that, my second biggest complaint is how the tv show was all “space is a vacuum so there isn’t any noise in space”, but the movie was all “LASERS!”
    
40. A Fistful of Dollars
    After Firefly, it occurred to me that I’m pretty undereducated in Westerns, and realized I needed to fix this. A Fistful of Dollars was rather flawed, but had quite a few really fun bits. Like the part from Back to the Future, Part II. So I guess you could just watch Back to the Future, Part II.
    

    Or just watch Part III because Part III is so much more fun.

41. Prometheus
    I imagine this would have been really cool if I had ever seen Alien.
42. The Incredible Hulk
    Yeah, Ruffalo is a way better Bruce Banner than Norton. Or, alternatively, this just isn’t a particularly good movie and the Banner we get in Avengers is just way way more interesting than this guy. For one thing, he actually does some science.
43. Captain America: The First Avenger*
    It’s a bit less disjointed and directionless the second time around, but, man, that musical number really kills this movie. Seriously.  Musical number.
44. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    So I watched this on an airplane flying from London to New York! It was very underwhelming! Nowhere near as fun as the first one, and also just really dull after BCC’s Sherlock.
45. The Woman in Black
    Boring.
46. Risky Business
    I wonder how many people only know this as the movie where Tom Cruise dances in a shirt and underwear and not the movie where a rich suburban white kid accidentally runs a prostitution ring.
47. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2*
    A little better than the first time I saw it, but I still think they made a lot of unnecessary alterations, both superficial and structural, to the strongest part of the source material. Somehow the opposite happened for Part 1, which I thought was the weakest part of the seventh book, but greatly improved for the movie adaptation. But the epilogue sucks no matter how you spin it, so whatever.
48. BraveSo I take Pixar movies very seriously. To the point where I wrote as long of a review of this movie as I did for its first trailer. I definitely need to see this again though. See if it’s any better after you get over the disappointment of how its not even remotely the movie it was advertised to be.
49. The Lion King*
    You know what sucks? When you have a ton of work to do and someone who lives with you decides to watch The Lion King. That work will not get done.
50. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    There’s a fight scene on horses. They’re not riding on horses and fighting. They’re running across horses and fighting.
    
51. The Amazing Spider-Man
    If Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield aren’t married in real life by now, I’m gonna be pissed.
    

    As these invasive celebrity magazine paparazzi photos would seem to indicate, this has, in fact, happened! Hooray!

52. Tangled
    Well, this was… surprisingly fucked up. About as average as I expected, though.
    
53. Shane
    Man, I was really hoping this would be… good.
54. Starship Troopers
    What’s better than having Neil Patrick Harris in a movie? Having psychic Neil Patrick Harris in a movie.
55. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope*
    Man, every time I watch this, it gets more obvious how terribly written it is.
56. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back*
    My sister wanted to rewatch the Star Wars trilogy. I stopped here because, as we know, Return of the Jedi is terrible.
57. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    I need to rewatch this. I’m too stupid to understand what happened.
58. Chinatown
    Well, this was pretty fantastic. I want to watch it again so I really catch everything, though.
59. The Searchers
    This movie is probably the only time anybody has ever successfully seduced someone by serenading them with “Skip To My Lou”.
60. The Dark Knight Rises
    It wasn’t Spider-Man 3 bad, but it was really disappointing and really stupid. Even for a movie about a man who dresses up as a bat and fights crime.
61. Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog*
    I know this isn’t really a movie but it’s like a movie so fuck the man, I’m counting it.
62. Rear Window*
    I made plans weeks in advance to watch this (and the next movie) with my friend after I took my last organic chemistry final. Also, to get burritos and drink a lot. She and I basically spent the entire movie gushing over how attractive Grace Kelly is. I mean seriously.
    

    Seriously.

63. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
    Be excellent to each other.
64. Back To The Future*
    I hadn’t watched this movie in years, and that is way too long to not watch Back to the Future. Also, I had spent like the entire year up to this point reading Ryan North’s Back to the Future novelization blog, so I’d been in the mood to watch it literally all year.
65. Back To The Future, Part II
    Yeah, I don’t like this one a lot.
66. Christopher and His Kind
    Good proof that Matt Smith was born to play The Doctor.
67. Mulan*
    You know how Mulan’s fake name when she’s pretending to be a guy is Ping? And her family’s fame is Fa? But they say their surname first, like at the end of the movie, the emperor addresses her as “Fa Mulan”? That means that her guy pseudonym is Fa Ping. Like… fapping… Just wanted to ruin the movie for you.
68. Back to the Future, Part III
    I actually like this one quite a lot more than Part II. The Western shit’s more fun than the future shit.
69. Jeff, Who Stays At Home
    Actually very good. The subplot with the mom felt out of place, which is weird since it was half the movie.
70. Paranorman
    It wasn’t until I saw a trailer for Frankenweenie right before the movie that I realized this movie wasn’t Frankenweenie. Which was a huge relief, because that movie looked dumb and this movie is pretty sweet.
71. Les Miserables 25th Anniversary Concert
    The problem with running Bad Books, Good Times is that every time I watch or read anything (anything), I can’t shake the need to figure out which character is “the Jacob”. Eponine is the Jacob. Les Mis is ruined forever. Also, Alfie Boe is awesome, and I saw him in a live performance of this once, and it was beautiful.
72. Project X
    It’s a comedy about a high school party that goes so out of hand that the house and surrounding neighborhood get destroyed as a SWAT team gets called in, presented as though it was a home video taken by one of the kids at the party. It’s almost more entertaining if you view it as a horror movie.
73. Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging*
    Just don’t even ask.
    

    Clever and unselfish.

74. 21 Jump Street
    Having never watched the original tv series, I still insist this actually gets really funny around the second half.
75. Airplane!*
    Watching this with someone who’s never seen it before is a pretty fantastic experience, let me tell you.
76. Mean Girls*
    She’s a life ruiner! She ruins peoples’ lives!
77. Zombieland*
    Our Presidential Debate Drinking Game was followed by a Zombieland Drinking Game.
    

    Drink every time a zombie is killed. You get drunk pretty fast.

78. Alien vs Predator
    Whatever.
79. Starbuck
    A surprisingly sweet comedy about a man who discovers he fathered five hundred children from selling to a sperm bank. Although the biologist part of me was freaking out during the whole movie because this guy seriously fucked up the Quebec gene pool for at least a century to come.
80. You’ve Got Mail*
    A few years ago, my best friend and I discovered we both like this movie, so he and I tried to organize a double date. Our girlfriends at the time had no interest.
81. L’Enfant D’En Haut
    I coincidentally saw this movie the same day it was submitted for Best Foreign Picture. LOOK HOW CULTURED I AM.
82. The Cabin in the Woods*
    Still awesome even with repeated viewings.
83. Halloweentown
    A friend wanted to watch the Halloweentown movies for her birthday. Who am I to say no?
    

    Although had I known about this little shit I probably could have.

84. Halloweentown 2: Kalabar’s Revenge
    I wish I could say that I didn’t watch the whole movie because I’m twenty-two years old and have no desire to watch Disney Channel Original movies, but  I couldn’t get past how they redesigned that goblin kid and made him less ugly now that he had more screen time. WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY, DISNEY?
85. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince*
    I fell asleep to this like three nights in a row. I’m sure somewhere between all of that there’s a complete viewing.
86. The Matrix*
    Man, I haven’t watched this since, like, middle school. I’m so glad it holds up.
87. Beauty and the Beast*
    I watched this with two friends after a Halloween party we had all gone to, and then on the way back drunkenly decided at 4am to make grilled cheese and watch this movie. We all sang every song (accidentally drunkenly harmonizing perfectly at the end of “Gaston”, which we spent the next five minutes freaking out about) up until “Beauty and the Beast” , at which point we promptly all fell asleep on each other. College.
88. Sixteen Candles
    What the fuck was this?
89. Beauty and the Beast*
    We decided to watch it again sober. See, sometimes I’m an okay influence.
    

    So you can enjoy your family friendly movie. About Stockholm Syndrome.

90. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone*
    Really hasn’t aged well. Still fun and cute, though.
91. The Ugly Truth
    I ate a whole bag of Doritos when I watched this movie and felt kind of sick the next morning.
92. Rango*
    Actually the best animated not-Pixar movie ever. Like when I reviewed it when it came out hey look at that
93. The Campaign
    Actually kind of alright?
94. Skyfall
    I really don’t know. I like how it breaks from the Bond formula and actually feels sophisticated, but I don’t know how much I actually enjoyed it. Also I went to the midnight showing and fell asleep through most of the climax, so…
95. Shrek*
    My roommates and I started doing this thing towards the end of the semester where we realized that, even though we all lived in the same apartment, we were so busy we went days without really seeing each other, so we decided to start making time to actually hang out over a beer and maybe a movie every few nights. Except instead of watching Shrek, we all just talked about our love lives the whole time, which was probably one of the more interesting viewings of Shrek I’ve ever experienced.
96. Super 8*
    I absolutely loved this movie the first time I saw it, despite the weak ending, but I was worried that the movie might only be interesting because of the mystery, and therefore not worth rewatching. But it held up surprisingly well to a second viewing! Yayyyy!
97. The Dictator
    Not the Charlie Chaplin one. I gave up about an hour in.
98. A Christmas Carol
    The creepy CGI Jim Carrey one. Did I mention it was creepy?
99. Les Miserables 25th Anniversary Concert*
    I watched it again with a friend who loves the musical and a friend who had never seen it. All that needs to be said is it prompted this exchange:
    “At least we agreed not to sing through it.”
    “Through most of it.”
    “BUT EPONINE WAS SAD.”
    

    =(

100. Dogma
     I’m always really hesitant to watch a new Kevin Smith movie, even though the two I saw before this (Clerks and Chasing Amy) immediately became some of my favorite movies. This was so fantastically hilarious and perfectly stupid. Definitely falls victim to “Kevin Smith writes too many goddamn words” syndrome (I made that up; it’s mine).
101. Friends With Benefits
     Makes sense.
102. Cowboys and Aliens
     Nowhere near as stupid as I was hoping it would be. Although Harrison Ford’s character had the exact same reaction to the plot that I did when it was revealed that the aliens came to Earth to get gold: “Well, that’s just ridiculous.”
103. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer*
     We watched Rudolph for a special video feature for the holidays at Bad Books Good Times! You should watch it! Hint hint!
104. The Lucky One*
     I have no idea how I wound up watching this twice.
105. Animal House
     I was underwhelmed.
106. Reservoir Dogs
     I really like this one. Takes quite a lot longer to get going than Pulp Fiction, but I feel like knowing all the pieces would make a second viewing of this really interesting.
107. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2*
     Gets a little better each time I see it. Still think they made a lot of really dumb decisions. Like how everyone explodes when they die.
108. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring*
     I haven’t watched this in years. I forgot how good it was. And how long it was. And how much fun that golf game on my phone is when Aragorn and Arwen are being boring.
109. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
     Whereas, wow, this was a huge disappointment. Massive problems with tone and pacing. The first twenty minutes are basically a deleted scene right before the Lord of the Rings trilogy goes on, then the movie finally remembers it’s about The Hobbit, and then decides it’s a three hour film about the first hundred pages or so of a children’s book and tries to be as dramatic as LOTR. Want to know how overly-long this movie is? They left in the song the dwarves sing about Bilbo Baggins’s plates. They left in. A song. About. Fucking. Plates.
     

     Epic.

110. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers*
     This is good though.
111. For a Few Dollars More
     I liked this one a lot more than Fistful of Dollars, although the shootout at the end isn’t anywhere near as fun. Story is a lot stronger though.

And, uh, so that’s it! I watched movies! Yayyyyy

Over the past year or so, largely since I went to England, my tastes in music shifted slightly, although not really because of any particularly English influence so much as that’s just sort of what happens. Basically I noticed that I’d added a lot of new artists to my favorite music on Facebook and that the all time plays versus past 12 months plays on my last.fm were pretty different. Which I’m sure everyone cares a lot about.

Early last fall, I took a look at my top 20 most played artists from the past twelve months, because I was curious was, statistically speaking, were my favorite bands now. So even though I’m finally getting around to writing this and posting this in December, I’m sure that if I were to take a look at that same list now, it would be different, given how much more jazz and electronic music I’ve taken to listening to. But I thought it’d be fun to take a look at this. Or something. Hey, I can do whatever I want on this blog; I have Bad Books, Good Times for all my funny funny jokes now.

So here’s what was evidently my favorite music from roughly August 2011-2012 (I’m a student, the academic year is more important to me than the calendar year). Included is a little story about what each one of them means to me, as well as a song by each one that I think meant the most to me over the past year (as of three months ago). I’m sentimental and shit.

1. The Mountain Goats

Surprising absolutely no one, I’m a huge, huge fan of The Mountain Goats. Like, on the list of my most listened to artists over the past twelve months, everything was in the low hundreds, whereas The Mountain Goats were around like 1300 or something ridiculous. My friends make fun of me all the time for how much Mountain Goats I listen to. Simply put, this band has recently started to mean a lot to me. John Darnielle’s songwriting largely inspired me to get more serious about my own songwriting (read: actually start songwriting), and his talent for storytelling, conveying depressing and melancholic feelings, and simply writing perfect, perfect lyrics are entrancing.

There’s the anthem of defiantly fighting a losing battle in “This Year”, where I first discovered The Mountain Goats, where the chorus simply chants “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me”. There’s the bitter “fuck you” of an emotionally exhausted  relationship turned sour in “No Children” where Darnielle’s speaker admits “I hope it stays dark forever / I hope the worst isn’t over / I hope you blink before I do / I hope I never get sober / And I hope when you think of me years down the line / You can’t find one good thing to say” and then admits defeat with “I hope you die / I hope we both die”. Then in contrast, sort of, there’s “Woke Up New”, the best break up song ever, where Darnielle captures the loneliness and the weight of the life of the very newly single, singing “The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it / But I drank it all, just ’cause you hate it when I let things go to waste”. In actual contrast, there’s the never give up message in the sad tale of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton”, warning “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank or forgive you / The best ever death metal band out of Denton will in time both outpace and outlive you”, then ending repeated cries of “Hail Satan”, for emphasis. Even from the newest album, last October’s Transcendental Youth, Darnielle maintains his talent for simply expressing the darker sides of feeling, simply offering a reminder that “Some things you do just to see how bad they make you feel” from a sympathetic voice saying “but I am just a broken machine / and I do things that I don’t really mean”.

I could go on for-goddamned-ever.

As you could guess, it was really hard for me to pick just one song that I think meant the most to me over the past year. My favorite Mountain Goats album, All Hail West Texas, has lots of songs about dysfunctional relationships, like every other Mountain Goats album. But the song “Source Decay” is one of a handful talking about life well after the dysfunctional relationship. Well past the breakup (if the song is even about a romantic relationship – it’s ambiguous), in this song the pain of the relationship destroying the people in it and breaking it off have long passed. Now all that remains are the inevitable reminders of it having existed at all. In contrast to all the songs about living with pain, this song is about living with its lasting damage. Here, “I let a few of my defenses fall / And I smile a bitter smile / It’s not a pretty thing to see / I think about a railway platform back in nineteen eighty-three”. It’s about remembering.

I’m kind of a depressing person.

2. Barenaked Ladies

For the longest time, I considered the criminally underrated Barenaked Ladies to be my favorite band. I discovered them in seventh grade through their then-newest album Everything to Everyone, which, in hindsight, was actually sort of the beginning of the end for them. That was when, after the commercial failure of Maroon, in turn after the commercial breakthrough of Stunt because of the hit “One Week”, they unfortunately embraced their one hit wonder-ness and tried to recreate the success of “One Week” – Ed Robertson’s rapped verses and silly subject matter – with “Another Postcard”, a song about receiving lots of postcards with monkeys on them. There was enough else on the album to enthrall seventh-grade me, however, largely Steven Page’s  lullaby from hell, “War on Drugs”, an incredibly depressing anti-suicide song that does its very best to convince us that we all need to do a better job helping each other, until it sort of gives up, bluntly ending with “another died and the world just shrugged it off”.

And all anybody knows them for is that goddamn “One Week” song.

As much as I love Stunt and Maroon, their debut album Gordon shows a completely different, more energetic band. Last summer I finally got around to hearing more of their older material, starting with the live album Rock Spectacle, which plays like a greatest hits of pre-”One Week” Barenaked Ladies. And oh my god, this Barenaked Ladies is so much better. While they broke off from their darker, more depressing side, as evidenced by the post-”One Week” song “War on Drugs”, it certainly got pushed out of the spotlight, whereas here it’s on full display. Page begs for forgiveness on “Break Your Heart” for not being strong enough to end a relationship he knew he needed to. Robertson adopts the voice of a window washer on a skyscraper wishing he could fly away from his life if he weren’t scared of heights. And my personal favorite, “Straw Hat and Old Dirty Hank”, the perfect union of an obsessive speaker with an unrequited love and high-intensity, manic music.

3. Radiohead

Whereas the Barenaked Ladies were the first band I “discovered”, in middle school, and the Mountain Goats I discovered in college, Radiohead falls right in the middle. I discovered them my junior year of high school, having heard the name so many times I finally gave up and Googled it and watched a live performance of “Paranoid Android”, and it was the most intensely I was ever completely blown away by music. I’ve stuck pretty closely to them ever since, loving pretty much everything they do for different reasons. The Bends for fantastic alternative rock, King of Limbs for study music, and OK Computer for being perfect. The war between OK Computer and Kid A is too close for me to call, although nowadays I do tend to listen to the latter more often, but I’m probably one of two or three people that does so not for “The National Anthem”, but for “How To Disappear Completely”.

The narrator describes, with an unnervingly stark sense of bleakness, simply floating through life, feeling completely disconnected from it. But what really drives this home is the lush instrumentation, so full and beautiful in comparison to the emotionally castrated lyrics that it simply isn’t fair. While the music soars, there’s increasing strain and desperation in the narrator’s repeated lines of “I’m not here / This isn’t happening” until it finally reaches the breaking point and becomes a series of sorrowful wails.

4. Bomb the Music Industry!

I went to a Bomb the Music Industry! concert in Chicago last summer, where I stood in the front row, all the way to the left, to avoid the mosh pit, because as much as I love punk rock, I don’t enjoy the moshing that comes along with it (I’m a tiny person). Their guitarist/keyboardist/trombonist/backing vocalist held the microphone out to people in the crowd throughout the concert, and, as luck would have it, put the microphone in my face during the part of “The First Time I Met Sanawon” I didn’t know the words to. It was a little embarrassing, since the song referenced Chicago, which was where the fucking concert was.

BtMI! is another band I first heard in high school, but – despite my general move away from punk rock – has become increasingly important to me since then. Maybe it has more staying power for me because it’s become increasingly apparent to me just how depressing Jeff Rosenstock’s lyrics are, and, as should be pretty obvious by now, is something that greatly appeals to me. As much as I ate up the (then) new album Vacation, I also started really getting into the old stuff on Album Minus Band. There’s considerably more variety here than most of the punk rock I listened to in high school, and its probably why it’s still worth listening to in college.

At the concert, just before the band got on stage, I got into a conversation with another fan there and learned that the band had actually announced on their website three days earlier that they were going to disband, which, as much as it bummed me out, made me that much happier that I was finally seeing them live. I’m going to miss the fuck out of this band.

5. Modest Mouse

I loved Good News For People Who Love Bad News in high school, yet never got around to listening to any of Modest Mouse’s other stuff for the longest time, apparently out of fear that I wouldn’t revere it as much. Especially daunting was the hype surrounding The Moon & Antarctica. I finally listened to it last spring after deciding I was in the right, melancholy sort of mood I imagined I would need to be in for Modest Mouse, which was a very good assumption. “3rd Planet” got me through more than a few difficult times, and then became one of the first songs I learned on guitar that required something other than strumming chords.

I feel like I’d regret not mentioning “Talking Shit About A Pretty Sunset” though, because there’s some damn good lyrics in there. “Talking shit about a pretty sunset /Blanketing opinions that I’ll probably regret soon / I’ve changed my mind so much I can’t even trust it / My mind changed me so much I can’t even trust myself”. Isaac Brock knows how to haunt.

6. Black Sabbath

I had heard Paranoid once in high school, but last year I gave it another listen and it really grabbed my attention. For some weird reason, Black Sabbath was perfect work music for me. I could study, read, write, anything to Black Sabbath. Especially if aforementioned studying, reading, or writing took place after midnight. Since a lot of my work gets done really late at night, when I’ve discovered (especially if I’m writing), that I need to listen to something and it needs to keep me awake, almost all of my papers over the past year have been written, in part, to Black Sabbath. This probably makes me weird.

7. Talking Heads

I started listening to Talking Heads in my senior year of high school. I remember my reaction to my first listen to Remain In Light: telling my dad that I “didn’t get it”. I think it’s now my most listened-to album in my iTunes library. Stop Making Sense is probably my favorite live album by any band ever. Probably. I didn’t really think about it very much before throwing myself behind that statement, like most of my thoughts whenever I listen to Talking Heads. As much as I love Talking Heads and many other bands that I know are a little unconventional and polarizing, I’m pretty sure Talking Heads is the one that I actually could not be friends with someone if they didn’t like. You know, if it came up.

8. The Strokes

At some point last year, fall 2011, I finally “got” The Strokes. It feels very nostalgic to me, and usually makes me think of different times throughout college. I don’t know why, though, because very few of the times it reminds me of were even times when I listened to The Strokes.

9. Led Zeppelin

When I was in England, I went to a Led Zeppelin tribute band concert. By myself. It was awesome.

10. Arctic Monkeys

I saw them at Lollapalooza summer 2011, where it thunderstormed and their set was delayed about an hour, and I was stuck outdoors in the rain and storm the whole time. Alex Turner dedicated “She’s Thunderstorms” to the weather.

11. David Bowie

Much like Modest Mouse, I had one album during high school that I absolutely loved (Ziggy Stardust because like anybody listens to any other Bowie album first?) and only just got around to finally listening to more of his music. I bet these two artists are not compared to each other particularly often.

12. Have Fun Dying

An unsigned alt metal band from Tulsa I discovered in high school that disbanded years ago. The singer/guitarist had a new band, Popular Culture, that also disbanded. I emailed him earlier this year asking if he was doing anything new yet and he sent me some solo work I rather liked. Maybe I’ll send him another email soon.

13. Gorillaz

Finally started listening to this band, although by that I mean I finally really got into Demon Days, don’t particularly like Plastic Beach outside of “On Melancholy Hill” , and still haven’t listened to their eponymous debut album. Also The Fall is basically just background music, which is… fine. Demon Days is fucking awesome, though.

14. Blur

I actually probably listened to Blur way more in high school, but I only had their greatest hits at the time and last year I finally took a listen to some of their other albums.  Modern Life Is Rubbish was probably my favorite for a while, but 13‘s really grown on me and probably is now. Fascinating! Actually, I’m mostly just amused that two Damon Albarn groups wound up right next to each other on this list.

15. Reel Big Fish

I sort of stopped listening to particularly much ska this year. I did finally get to see Reel Big Fish live, though. It’s a shame it was the post-Scott Klopfenstein, post-Matt Wong, pseudo-legacy act Reel Big Fish of today than the incarnation of Our Live Album Is Better Than Your Live Album, because it was almost entirely just Aaron Barret making jokes anymore. But the concert was amazing. I also made a first date out of it, which was unexpected.

16. Streetlight Manifesto

More ska I mostly listened to but now I don’t so much anymore. Except their third album is finally coming out and I am so excited. Tomas Kalnoky’s acoustic folk reworkings of the songs on Streetlight Lullabies was a nice placeholder for a little bit, although I ultimately didn’t listen to it as much as I thought I would. Really interested in how The Hands That Thieve is coming out with a Streetlight version and a Kalnoky acoustic version simultaneously.

17. Grizzly Bear

I’m pretty sure this is only on the list because my last.fm scrobbler screwed up one time and gave everything I listened to that week like 11 times as many listens as they actually had or something. Not that I don’t love this band though, but I haven’t listened to Horn of Plenty and only listened to Yellow House once or twice, so basically all of this comes from Veckatimest, which is fantastic. Not sure if Shields had come out yet when I took this list, because that would explain things, because that album is beautiful too.

18. Less Than Jake

Was my favorite ska-punk band in high school. Less so now. Basically just comes up on shuffle and I freak out for three minutes and then I’m good. Though this does happen a lot.

19. Fucked Up

Okay, I know this is only here because of David Comes To Life, which definitely gets more than a little bogged down by being way too long, but holy shit the first few songs are awesome.

20. The Pillows

I finally (notice a trend yet?) started listening to the material these guys have outside of what was featured in FLCL. It’s good.

So I haven’t been doing the Saturday Music Diary feature for a while here, because 1) between last semester and Bad Books Good Times, I never have time to write for Nihilist Penguins, and it seems dumb to only update this with music logs because I realize these posts might not be the most interesting to everyone, and 2) I can never remember to actually post them on Saturdays.

So my last fall semester of college ever just ended (oh god I’m almost an adult oh god) and I didn’t have any exams, but rather just a bunch of papers. Which I’m good with. I much prefer writing. You probably would never have guessed that, based on all the blogging I do. Anyway, here’s all the music that I decided would be good paper writing music.

• Portishead
  I just put all of it on shuffle for a few hours. The three studio albums, the live album, just all of it on shuffle for a few hours because I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to listen to. Then I listened to the live album. Basically I just really love Portishead.
  
• Dire Straits
  Lately I’ve started to really get into Dire Straits. When I say “really get into Dire Straits”, I also sort of mean “I listened to Brothers in Arms once and Making Movies twice, and ‘Far Away’, ‘Money For Nothing’, and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ like a zillion”. So I need to actually listen to these albums way more often, because it’s really good. Soon as I stop listening to “Romeo and Juliet” on repeat because I’m a sad person.
  
• Afro Celt Soundsystem
  A good friend of mine and I were studying and he put Afro Celt Soundsystem on shuffle for about an hour. Still not sure if I like it or not.
• Freddie Hubbard
  Kind of my favorite jazz musician, largely because I haven’t gotten around to getting more Lee Morgan yet. I’m a huge huge fan of Backlash and I’ve finally gotten around to listening to some of his other stuff and hearing how jazz changed over a huge amount of time, based on Born to Be Blue, Goin’ Up, High Energy, and Straight Life. But holy sweet goddamn, you guys, jazz is awesome.
  
• Wilco
  So I finally got around to listening to Wilco, and oh my god, I’ve clearly been missing out, because I took one listen to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and already loved it. Actually I just listened to “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” and that was all it took. I really hope nobody looks too closely at my last.fm, because they’d see that I listened to “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” about a billion times in the past few weeks. Which is especially bad coupled with how, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve also listened Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” about a billion times in the past few weeks.
  
• Aphex TwinSo in addition to jazz, I’ve also started listening to electronic music. Which regular readers know isn’t new information. And new readers probably don’t care. I’m not sure why I’m writing any of these sentences.
  So I’ve basically just been listening to Richard D. James Album and …I Care Because You Do. The contrast between the hyperactive drums and smooth synthesized strings on “Girl/Boy Song” is amazing. This is fantastic music to work to.
  
• …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
  I can only write papers to metal or hard rock if it’s really late at night. No idea why. It’s not because I feel tired, it’s just that time of night calls for something with loud guitars and maybe people who scream sometimes if I’m gonna be sitting in one place thinking about literary theory and stuff. Note that this is the first time in christ knows how long that I didn’t put on Black Sabbath to write a paper. I don’t know who I am anymore.
  Also, can we talk about how Worlds Apart has the ugliest album art?
  
• Locust Toybox
  Locust Toybox is goddamn cute, that’s what it is.
• MF DOOM
  Sometimes people come over to my apartment to do work with me and they complain that MF DOOM is really repetitive. But I’m trying to get work done and I sometimes hearing the same thing for four or five minutes at a time is exactly what I need?
  
• Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
  Goddamn, I love jazz.
  
• Boards of Canada
  Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to avoid using Boards of Canada as work music all the time now that I know it exists, is there?

Dear everyone who uses Snapchat,

Please stop.

Seriously. I’m kind of befuddled by this. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the idea, which – for those who have managed to avoid this trend – sounds perfectly non-detrimental to society. Snapchat is a smartphone app that lets you send pictures to your friends. You may think “wait, we’ve had this technology for like ten years now what”, but there is a catch: you can send pictures to your friends, but they can only see them for a few seconds. Your friend sees a picture they can only see for a short amount of time and then they can never see it again, like an existential statement on the impermanence of the human condition. Or for sending dick pix.

With a smug grin like that, you know which way this is going to go between existentialism and dicks.

Except amazingly, and somehow unfortunately, people have found a use for Snapchat outside of that. People now use it to take pictures of themselves making ridiculous or stupid faces and send them to their friends.

All. The goddamn. Time.

Snapchat has somehow made it perfectly normal for someone to be on their phone, then suddenly make a stupid face completely out of the blue for five seconds and then act as though this was perfectly normal behavior. And look, I’m sure it’s fun, but it gets weird when this happens all the time, when you stop actual conversations you’re having with people right in front of you, or – amazingly enough – in the middle of class.

Now imagine if, instead of passing a note, they were just making stupid faces in three second intervals.

Here are better things you can do with Snapchat!

• Send secret codes to people. People like detectives and spies. BE A SPY.
• Become an evil criminal mastermind and send the police clues they can only see for three seconds. There’s still time for you to become history’s first Snapchat killer!
• Use Instagram! (debatable if this is better or worse)

I really don’t care what you do with Snapchat. Just please stop using Snapchat to make unexplained ridiculous faces in public and then when people stare at you, act like they’re the weird one. Just please do something else.

Basically all I’m saying is that the world would be a much better place if we stopped using Snapchat in public and instead used it for what it was always meant to be used for: sexting.

Well, between senior year of  college and Bad Books, Good Times, updating this blog is really hard. So is writing anything else. But I finally wrote a new poem this week for the first time like half a goddamn year, and, hey, why not throw personal shit up on the internet where anybody can read it?

The poem’s titled “Bloodsucking”

- – -

A single freedom from restraint
With which at last I may acquaint.
From puncture wounds, attachment dripped;
You bit my tongue, you bit my lips,
And when you dried me to the bone
Then I had wings, then I had flown.
The bitter taste the tongue outlasts
Still spits out stories from the past.

I think we should get a drink

Movement that your face supported,
Now so close it’s all distorted.
With alcohol and with caffeine,
Suck out each drop of dopamine.
Out at night with less invested,
Mindful now of what our flesh did,
Where you could do so easily
Something regrettable with me.

I think I really shouldn’t
I think I’m really drunk

Fire burnt out, smoke in our lungs,
Ashes pass between our tongues.
I don’t like to light the match;
You don’t know the flame won’t last.
When I dry you to the bone,
In new arms I’ll be alone.
To another vein I must,
Sun will rise, you’ll turn to dust.

I think I woke up in your bed
But I looked in your mirror
And I couldn’t see myself

I think something’s wrong with your mirror

- – -

The first stanza’s in iambic tetrameter, the second stanza alternates between trochaic and iambic tetrameter, and the third stanza is whatever three and a half trochaic feet is. Basically, if you haven’t written poetry in half a year, you can’t just east into it.

Just because I know going to Taco Bell is a terrible decision, it doesn’t mean I’m not gonna do it. So when I heard that Taco Bell was giving away its new Doritos taco for free yesterday, I realized what must be done.

Hey, it’s two weeks’ worth of music I’ve been listening to and my thoughts on them that are very interesting. How fortunate!

(*albums that are relatively new to me; **albums I listened to as a music director of my college radio station)

October 7

• I’m The Manager – The Manager’s Files*
  I still can’t tell this apart from Grape Digging Sharon Fruits for the most part. David Firth and his stupidly many bands that I all enjoy.
• The Mountain Goats – All Hail West Texas
  Man, I haven’t listened to this in forever, and by “forever” I mean “maybe like four or five weeks”.
• The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth
  God, I love the new album.

October 8

• Wax Tailor – Hope and Sorrow*
• Jason Lytle – Dept. of Disappearance**
• Yellow Red Sparks – Four Steps in Corsets**
• Cécile Hortensia – Papillons**
  So this is an interesting blend of alt-country a la Neko Case or Jessica Lea Mayfield, and then also French… music? Okay, I’m a little out of my element here. It’s really interesting how the album bounced back and forth between the two. Also, I’m one of four people who’s listened to it, according to Last.fm, so other people need to get on this!
• Grizzly Bear – Shields*
  This has been getting insanely good reviews. Perhaps because it is insanely good? INDEED.
• Metric – Synthetica

October 9

• Morning Runner – Wilderness is Paradise Now*
• Dragonette – Bodyparts*
  So many people are mad at me that I didn’t like this.
• Stars – The North*
• The Heavy – The Glorious Dead*
• Ratatat – Classics
  I can’t decide if I like “Wildcat” or not. Because it samples an actual goddamned cat.

October 10

• Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
  As great as a single Mumford & Sons song is – “Little Lion Man” has like a billion plays in my iTunes – the formula wears a little thin over the course of a whole album. I haven’t listened to the whole thing more than two or three times, but it’s not as engaging a listen as I’d have hoped for. It makes for some damned good background music, though. So, yeah, I imagine nobody’s going to care what I have to say about the new album when I eventually listen to it, based on that glowing review.
• Modest Mouse – This Is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About
  Old Modest Mouse is the shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

October 11

• Jessica Lea Mayfield – Tell Me
  This is just such good music for walking around at night. Which is maybe a weird review?

October 12

• Less Than Jake – Anthem
  Haha haven’t listened to this in forever haha

October 15

• Muse – Origin of Symmetry
  Definitely growing on me.
• a-ha – Hunting High and Low
  This has also grown on me! Yay!
• Grizzly Bear – Shields
  This is AWESOME.

October 16

• Butterfingers – Breakfast at Fatboys
• David Byrne & St Vincent – Love This Giant
  It’s like David Byrne funk but with a horn section. This requires more listens. Like a lot of them.
• Boards of Canada – The Campfire Headphase*
  Maybe my favorite Boards of Canada? I don’t know, I haven’t been paying much attention. This one was quite pleasant for me for whatever reason.
• Cults – Cults
• Ratatat – Classics
• Ratatat – LP3*

October 17

• Grizzly Bear – Shields
• Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
  I still like this slightly more than Shields, but probably because I’ve listened to it a thousand times.
• The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth
  I’M STILL HERE BRR BRR BRR BRRRRR that was supposed to be the horn section… that didn’t work, did it?
• Blur – 13

October 18

• Radiohead – Amnesiac
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – Chronicle, Vol 1
  Basically when you’re up doing work at 2am and you’ve already listened to a bunch of shoegaze, you just have to go over to CCR.
• Matt & Kim – Lightning*
  Doesn’t really play to their strengths.

October 19

• Radiohead – Pablo Honey
• Barenaked Ladies – Born on a Pirate Ship

Personal favorite three songs from all of that for these past two weeks? Sounds good!

David Byrne & St. Vincent – “Who”

I mean, is it even possible to listen to this song and not dance along to it? Like some weird, disjointed, David Byrne-esque dance? Not in the slightest! Dance!

Muse – “Plug In Baby”

UNSUSTAINABLE wait wrong song

The Mountain Goats – “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1″

Yes, I am going to put a song from the new Mountain Goats album here every single time I do one of these for at least a few weeks. It’s like you don’t even know me.

Okay, I haven’t updated in a while, nor have I updated consistently in a while. So in a really poor attempt to make it up to you, here’s a Modest Mouse cover I did on acoustic guitar a few months back.

This recording, unimpressive as it is, is very important to me. I don’t own an acoustic guitar, but during my time studying abroad in England last year, I was able to borrow one from my school’s program. Lots of things happened with that guitar, the most obvious one being that I got better at guitar, to the point where I actually feel comfortable telling people I play guitar as opposed to “I’m learning how to play guitar”. Additionally, this was my first time writing music on guitar, which I had previously only done with ukulele (and once sort of with piano). Of course, as I’ve mentioned previously, my year abroad in England was when I first really started writing music. Possibly more importantly, music I could actually share. That year I actually learned how to sing the songs I was writing. Finally being able to listen to my voice singing the songs I’ve written, after years of hating the sound of my voice, was a very big deal for me.

Outside of music, the year in England was a very significant and emotional year for me, for a number of reasons I’ve previously discussed when explaining the story behind the album I wrote that year and many others, some of which are discussed in the songs I wrote, some of which aren’t. Basically, it was a huge year for me. In order to deal with that aforementioned hugeness, I did what I’ve done my whole life, and buried myself in music. Last year was the first time I listened to Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica, after years of putting it off, worried that I wouldn’t “get” it. I have no idea if I “got” it or not, but after a few listens, I loved the album, especially the opening track “3rd Planet”, which got me through more than a few difficult times.

So why does this recording mean so much to me? This recording is the last time I played that guitar. A few days before I left England, I had to return the guitar that I had gone through so much personal growth on, at the end of a year that also brought a ton of personal growth. So I thought it fitting to record my last song on it. This was recorded in the midst of packing, at three am, literally a day or two before I left the country. I didn’t know the lyrics yet and the fingering was the most complicated thing I had ever learned how to do on a guitar.

So, yeah, I’ll write a funny post for this blog soon, I promise, but right now I felt like it was the right time to share a personal story and a song. That I didn’t write.

Okay, technically it’s Sunday, but I haven’t done one of these in forever and that’s kind of my bad. I’ll be trying to get some real blog posts up on this blog soon, because it’s been somewhat neglected as of late. Anyway, music diary! Yay if you’re into that!

(*albums that are relatively new to me; **albums I listened to as a music director of my college radio station)

September 30

• Falty DL – Love Is a Liability
  Jeph Jacques told me this is dubstep, and this is what made me realize that I have absolutely no understanding of electronic music genres. This is fantastic music, mind, so I’m not complaining.
• LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening
• Lana Del Rey – Born To Die
• Metric – Synthetica*
• The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth*
  Yep. New Mountain Goats album came out last week. Expect me to talk about this a lot.
• The Pixies – Come On Pilgrim
• Boards of Canada – Twoism
• Bon Iver – Bon Iver
• Sleigh Bells – Treats*
  Still trying to get into this one as much as Reign of Terror, but I think I’m definitely getting there. My friend thinks I’m weird for thinking this is good reading music. Yeah, pretty much.
• Ratatat – Classics*

October 1

• Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers – Moanin’
• Seapony – Falling**
  If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog for at least two years and have a frankly terrifying dedication to it, you may recall that I’m a music director at my college’s radio station, so I get sent a lot of music to listen to and have to decide if any of it’s good. Not much this week, so it’s kind of a bad week to start talking about this, but, whatever. Anyway, this one’s ok but it’s basically the same pretty song again and again.
• John Cale – Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood**
  The first track on this is pretty nice, but the bulk of it wasn’t really my thing. Probably still alright, although I know nothing about Velvet Underground, so I can’t really talk about this album.
• Adebisi Shank – This Is The Second Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank

October 2

• Sioum – I Am Mortal, But Was Fiend
  Progressive instrumental metal band I saw in Chicago once when my friend dragged me to their concert. Wound up buying their album afterwards and, man, I cannot wait for more music from these guys.
• Portishead – Third
  I think every time I listen to Portishead I feel compelled to say something here about how I don’t listen to Portishead enough.
• Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms

October 3

• The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth*
• Weezer – Pinkerton

October 4

• The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth*
• The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree

October 5

• Matt & Kim – Matt & Kim*

So, some favorite songs from all that this week? Yeah, let’s do that!

Weezer – “Across The Sea”

Pinkerton has gradually moved from “that one Weezer album I can actually listen to, if I remember correctly” to “easily one of my top ten favorite albums ever oh my goodness gracious”. So I’ve started going through phases of my favorite song on it, because about a year ago it was “Why Bother?”, then earlier this year it was “Falling For You”, and right now we’ve got “Across the Sea” (although I’m slowly moving onto “El Scorcho” so figured I’d better do this fast). Absolutely love that “How I need a hand in mine to feel” line.

Dire Straits – “So Far Away”

Apparently it was a week of really being into songs about being far away from people? Dunno. The way the deep piano kicks in at the start of the chorus really draws out the depth of the emotion here.

LCD Soundsystem – “Dance Yourself Clean”

I love this song, but it’s really awkward to play at parties because the first minute and a half is so quiet. Also because the type of parties you can play LCD Soundsystem at are hipster parties, which are so much better than “CHUG CHUG CHUG BROS BROS BROS” parties, which gets a little fucked if you and another person spontaneously do the “ah AAAHHHH” part of this song and there’s one aforementioned CHUG CHUG BROS BROS person at the party who hasn’t figured out this isn’t that sort of party yet. So, yeah, uh, college is tough?

Portishead – “Magic Doors”

Earlier this year I had a friend over studying in my room and I was playing from my chill playlist on shuffle, which, much like it sounds, is a selection from my iTunes library that I think is relaxing and easy to work to. It was at this song that they said I have really weird music.

The Mountain Goats – “Cry for Judas”

Over the past year and a half or so, The Mountain Goats have become a favorite band of mine and increasingly important. I got into them a little after the release of All Eternals Deck, and so this is the first new album they’ve released since I became a fan, and kind of an insanely obsessed fan at that, admittedly. I preordered Transcendental Youth to get the bonus 7″ vinyl. I don’t own a record player, nor how to use one. I’m still looking for a way to display it somehow, but don’t know anything about vinyl. Thankfully, it also came with a small poster of the album artwork that I didn’t even know was coming, and I kind of freaked out about this, much to the annoyance of everyone who follows me on Twitter. Anyway, I kind of love the album a lot already, and this song is fantastic. “Some things you do just to see how bad they’ll make you feel” and “I am just a broken machine / and I do things that I do not mean” are two of some of those lyrics that I’ve already got swimming around in my subconscious now that really bother my friends when I start singing them out of the blue and don’t realize I am. It’s probably an improvement over “I hope you die, I hope we both die”, though.