As usual, my end of the year musings are pretty much exclusively dominated by what happened in the past 6 weeks, making my impression of 2008 be that of a pretty stressful year.  Forcing myself to look back with a little bit wider lens, though, I think it was actually pretty good.  Ross already mentioned that it’s been a good year for movies, but it’s been pretty sweet on a bunch of other fronts, too.  Here’s some stuff just off the top of my head.  These don’t occupy any order other than they’re what’s on my mind.

Best Music

This year was pretty heavily December-ended with my end-of-November birthday and Christmas supplying most of my year’s musical acquisitions.  Lindsay Anderson’s If,  wherein L’Altra’s chanteuse cuts a solo album and it’s pretty sweet. Beach House’s Devotion I got for Christmas and is on heavy rotation at the moment. Dreamy and intense.  And even though it didn’t come out this year, Bibio’s Hand Cranked is like the best album ever made.

Best Movies

Punisher: War Zone – ridiculously severe and surprisingly filigreed shoot-em-up.

Dark Knight riff trax – ANYBODY WANNA GO TO SHAKEY’S?

Best Video Games

I think I missed every important video game release this year due to outdated equipment.  Didn’t play anything old I found especially memorable, either.  I think my 2008 videogaming experience can be summed up by me playing through phantasy star I and II on game boy advance, hating every minute of it, but just finishing it because I started it.

Best Gaming

It’s been a banner year for roleplaying since Ross started 2 new games, I ended 2, and a few others have had significant streaks of riveting storyline.  It even spurred me to write and submit a few short stories.

Best Movie Night

I think both Ross and I had visions of some Ultimate Movie NIght where it would be me, Ross, Dan, Mark, Rob, and Andrey.  We even had a list of “ringers” all lined up and ready to go, but alas it wasn’t to be as everyone’s post-Christmas schedules were just too divergent.  Nevertheless, there were several memorable movie nights this year, including I think the Avatar run (? was that this year?), and the He-Man/She-Ra specials.

Best Science

Mark hit the big time this year [link updated], and Chu laid down a monster Applied Optics paper.

Best Books

Devoured a shitload of Delany and a bunch of Conan comics, too.  Have to say I’m still pretty into them both, though I think I’ve basically plumbed the depths of both of these wells at this point.  But I’m looking foward to reading Delany and Howard Chaykin’s comic Empire: A Visual Novel which I got for Christmas.

Best Future

Also giving a lot of thought to what 2009 will hold, of course.  Basically invested the whole of my being in the NSF fellowship application I have in, and will probably end up dying if I don’t get it.  Leaving the professional stuff aside, I think the thing I look forward to most is Darren’s triumphant return to movie night.

So what have you guys been into this year?  What are you looking forward to in the future?

Any chance you all are going to be around on the 23rd-24th?  I’m going to be in town starting tomorrow afternoon, assuming I don’t get stranded by snow in some airport…

Junot Díaz is not one of those stumbling, mumbling writers who you’ll listen to in an interview and think, “What the hell? How’d he get so damn eloquent in print?”  Díaz, author of the short story collection Drown and last year’s ass-kicking (this is a term Díaz would appreciate), Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao kills in interview format.  After hearing him over the radio, regaling a San Francisco crowd on growing up Dominican American in New Jersey, on the comics, fantasy and sci-fi he devoured as a kid, and on the apparently more “serious” literature he discovered later, I knew I had to check out this guy’s writing.  Oscar Wao, Díaz’s debut novel, doesn’t disappoint.  Like most good fiction, simply summarizing its plot only goes a short way toward capturing its particular importance or appeal – think about how unimpressive Don Quijote would seem if you reduced it to the mad knight’s travel schedule. 

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You know the drill, hanging out on the couch, watching some TV, commercial comes on. What’s that song? That sounds pretty good. I should check that out. Then you’re doing some research and find out you’re like 2 years behind the curve, all the hipsters 8 years younger than you have already been there, done that. Yeah, it takes the wind out of your sails a little bit when you come to the realization that you’re being out-gunned by the same sort of jerk you used to be. But sometimes you have to take the hit and think about getting into something that’s well behind the cutting edge. Here’s the latest hit-list of band whose commercial songs made me think about getting into them.

Ruby Suns – Tane Mahuta (their Oh, Mojave is in the Microsoft “Mojave Experiment” commercials):

MGMT – Time to Pretend (heard this on some snowboarding x-games thing on TV a couple weeks ago):

here (embedding disabled)

Chairlift – Planet Health (their song Bruises was in an ipod commercial):

kudos to ross for his book water baby being selected as one of ny mag’s top 10 graphic novels of 2008.

While driving to a doctor’s appointment yesterday at Clinton Crossings, I was jamming to some Calexico. I bought “Feast of Wire” while in Indiana this summer to provide some respite from the all-Coldplay-all-the-time playlist my dad had working. I’d listened to it a bunch when I got home, but for whatever reason most of the songs never really worked their way into memory. I was really giving it a listen this time around since I was in the car alone with nothing else to do. This song, in particular, “Not Even Stevie Nicks…” got me thinking:

The main lyric I was keying in on was when he goes: “Not even the priestess / with her wrenches / and secret powers / could save him” I’m not really a Calexico expert or anything, but, in conjunction with a lyric in the opening song, “Sunken Waltz,” “Tossed a Susan B. over my shoulder / and prayed it would rain and rain / submerge the whole Western states” there seems to be a sort of rural apocalypse thing going on thematically in the album. Like Beyond the Thunderdome or something, except with horses and ponchos instead of cars and metal.

Initially that got me thinking the probably intensely unoriginal thought that Westerns may as well be post-apocalyptic movies (The Postman is a sort of explicit realization of this), in that they exist in a dystopic realm where pockets of half-civilization (each town typically brutal or degraded in its own unique way) are surrounded by vast seas of lawlessness. A fascistic order is inevitably enforced by some kind of strongarm tactic, and the hero represents the sole island of sanity, isolated by his refusal to give in.

But even beyond that, I was thinking about what sort of society would exist if somehow the world did undergo some rural apocalypse. Music would be pared down to folk compositions that could be played on old acoustic instruments or else new acoustic instruments. Art as a whole would probably take on a recycled, use-what-you-got folk aesthetic as well. Maybe an emphasis on carving or metalwork or something that doesn’t require you to know how to create and mix pigments. Even dance and martial art would probably evolve along similar prototypical folk lines. Additionally, what would come of intellectual thought and philosophy? Leaving aside the question of who’s got time to rhapsodize about Marshall McLuhan or Derrida when you’ve got to hunt dinner and find someplace safe from the radioactive raiding parties, what’s left to deconstruct when all of history has essentially been deconstructed and erased? Would our whole modes of thought, patterns of reasoning, our entire worldview be changed? People either born or living in this post-apocalyptic reality would have to develop a wholly different “folk thought” divorced from the mediterranean-middle-eastern worldview that dominates Western culture today after having been left without access to the past 3000 years of classical and modern thought.

Anyway I guess it’s a banal insight on its own, unless you sat down and tried to invent such a possible thought system. But just tossing it out there to see if any of you guys know about any related ideas. I tried Googling “folk thought” but didn’t really come up with any killer hits, so I’m sure if the topic is discussed elsewhere it must have different terminology.

here’s a list of i’m pretty sure most of the movie night movies since mark stopped recording them. can you guys think of any more that i left out? these are just recent ones i remember and ones that were archived by netflix, but i know there were a handful we got from blockbuster or saw in the theater that i probably missed…

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Anyone want to get in? When’s good.

Check out Paulson at the end of this video.