"Man, Tim Tebow is like Moses. He's been chosen to lead the Jews out of the Promised Land." ((overheard just now))

Ten Songs from 2011

I actually "planned" it this year, wondered all the time this year which ten would make this list. Number one was fixed forever, but the rest of the list changed all year and changed again when I did my review today.

The song titles should all link to videos.

1. Wild Flag - Future Crimes

Pardon my life this time.

The desperation and urgency that make rock and roll. Sleater-Kinney had it and now Wild Flag have it.

2. The Weeknd - Wicked Games (explicit)

I left my girl back home.

The voice sells it. Party 'til you weep.

3. Fountains of Wayne - Someone's Gonna Break Your Heart

All we want to do is go home.

You can hire the actor who fits the part, or you can just hire the best actor.

4. Sloan - Unkind

You haven't got a clue.

They do such a clean job of it.

5. St. Vincent - Year of the Tiger

My kingdom for a cup of coffee.

It's never easy.

6. Terius Nash - Form of Flattery (explicit)

Stop acting like a freshman.

Better to skulk away than to apologize.

7. Emmy the Great - Paper Forest

You're not unlucky, no, you're just not very smart.

All in staccato. We can say the song is high-strung.

8. Adam and the Amethysts - Dreaming

We waded through up to our waists.

A fantasy, I guess. Someone spent a lot of time on this one.

9. The Good Natured - Skeleton

Never speak of this.

A pile of thrills.

10. Gotye (ft. Kimbra) - Somebody That I Used to Know

Now and then I think of when we were together.

Storytelling, I think. The xylophone is infectious.


Some HM's that maybe should have made it
Austra - The Beat and the Pulse
Azealia Banks - 212
Bon Iver - Holocene
Class Actress - Weekend
DJ Khaled ft. Drake, Lil Wayne, and Rick Ross - I'm On One
Drake ft. Rihanna - Take Care
Ronnie Dunn - Cost of Livin'
Kathleen Edwards - Change the Sheets
Florence and the Machine - What the Water Gave Me
Florrie - I Took a Little Something
Foster the People - Pumped Up Kicks
Frank Ocean - Novacane
David Guetta ft. Flo Rida and Nicki Minaj - Where Them Girls At
Heems - New York City Cops
Icona Pop - Manners
Kreayshawn - Gucci Gucci
Lana Del Rey - Video Games
Laura Marling - Sophia
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Heart in Your Heartbreak
Purity Ring - Ungirthed
Release the Sunbird - Outlook's Anonymous
tUnE-yArDs - Powa
Kurt Vile - Jesus Fever
Kanye West and Jay-Z - N****s in Paris
Wye Oak - Civilian

Waverley Salad
1 pile of spinach
1 apple (chopped)
1 banana (chopped)
1 Christmas orange
2 spoons hummus

Prep should be self-explanatory. I recommend a tupperware instead of a bowl so you can fasten the lid and shake.

I like John Hodgman, but Lemony Snicket has the power of a thousand John Hodgmans.

First recorded use of the phrase, "Small Sample Size Theatre." Thanks, Baseball Prospectus!

(For those not hip to it all, it means sports results.)

"You can get a Harvard education at the library for a dollar and fifty cents in late fees."
-- Cat and Girl author Dorothy Gambrell explains the problems with Good Will Hunting

There's a lot of articles about how [your, my] liberal arts degree is worth everything and nothing. And it could go either way, in terms of monetary value; there's still some invisible factor that still puts college grads in higher income brackets, no matter the other circumstances. But in terms of appreciation for life, or of understanding about the world, I don't know if it's really that much different from any other four-year experience.

I would guess that, of the great works I read in school, my understandings of those were at least as deep and thorough as most B.A. students, and that the rate of readings I completed was about average. And it happened a lot of the time that I would finish some classic and say, "That's a really nice piece of writing," or, "That's a pretty neat thought experiment." But it happened very rarely that I would finish my reading and say, "This changes everything," or, "This is completely right." To be honest, the times when I felt like my education was expanding my horizons or something came a lot more at the start of my degree -- maybe my horizons hit their limit after a couple of years.

What I got more often from my readings and lectures were answers to "why" questions, explanations of the origins and motivations and sources of important ideas. The things that taught me, in the last five years, about how life works, were (other than life, and other than conversations) mostly just stuff from pop culture.

I'm a pretty great pop culture snob, I think, and like getting a B.A., being a snob is one of the luxuries of having some money -- instead of watching TV for an escape, say, I'll want to watch TV for an experience. The TV and movies and music (and even books) that I go to for fun will "speak my language" and resonate, because they come from the same world as I do. Those are the works that actually have something to tell me.

If you ask an English major who her favourite poets are (and asking poets instead of writers should restrict the question to things they teach in school), she'll probably tell you Yeats or Eliot or someone who comes at the very recent end of the spectrum of required courses. And even if she says a Browning or Shakespeare (which is its own weird fetish in a lot of places), she probably won't go further back and say Chaucer or Pearl Poet or writer of Beowulf. Those poets are studied because they're a sort of foundation for other poets; their actual art and wisdom is nothing we still have use for.

(Philosophy is more complicated field, in terms of classic vs. contemporary, which is one of the many reasons it confuses the life out of me. Probably someone could use philosophy to prove most of this wrong.)

So I might be okay with the death of the arts education for now, because of libraries, because any Arts student could study Kant or Milton any time for free, but none of them actually wants to. Learning arts is a grind like any other degree, and the mind-expanding resonance of it all, or the spiritual payoff of it all, is only a shadow of the exact same payoff that the exact same students get from watching The Wire or reading Jane Eyre in their spare time.

I've finally got my arts degree, and I did kind of a bad job of it, and I think now that the better decision would have just been to go to school and get my Bachelor of Widget-Making. I may still go back to school and do that. I just want to put it out there that maybe young people should invest less in the cultural and mind-development value of learning the arts, when there's a richer version of that same experience on the campus file-sharing network. Maybe find a program with a better return on your time and tuition.

There's a famously-dumb scene in Glee where Gwyneth Paltrow says, "What do I know about Ceelo? Hit it!" And then she sings the Ceelo song with a bad word in it, but she sings the censored for radio version, which really takes away the whole purpose of the song, if having Gwyneth Paltrow sing it didn't already do that.

If anyone ever asks me what I know about Ceelo, I will definitely repeat the question and then tell them to hit it, and then I'll just start howling and howling. It will sound really nice: