Friday is Apparently List Day

After several years of blogging, I’ve finally figured out that Friday is list day. So here are a few lists:

Random Ten:

• Guster – “Two Points For Honesty”
• Amon Tobin – “Keepin’ It Steel (The Anvil Track)”
• Radiohead – “Optimistic”
• Four Tet – “As Serious As Your Life”
• The Bad Plus – “Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass”
• Lynyrd Skynyrd – “Free Bird” (Yee ha!)
• Yoko Kanno & Seatbelts – “Clutch”
• Franz Ferdinand – “Michael”
• Pink Floyd – “Money”
• Nine Inch Nails – “Awitha Teetha” (Well, it’s really just With Teeth, but I prefer Meathead’s title because it more accurately reflects the way the song sounds. Incidentally, I didn’t remember how Meathead spelled that, so I mistakenly googled for “awith teetha.” Google, ever thoughtful, corrected my spelling. This is mildly amusing.)

The Two Greatest Reviews of NIN’s With Teeth:

• The Aformentioned Meathead Review: Overall score of [AWITHA_TEETHA]: 9,116 out of 9,652 stars
• Tiny Mix Tapes Review: Concise but informative, and actually somewhat accurate. Sadly, Trentie Poo doesn’t seem likely to reverse the trend with his new album, Year Zero (which comes out in just a few weeks, only two years after Awitha Teetha and 17 years ahead of my speculation), but we shall see, I guess. If you’re interested, there’s a thread in the Kaedrin Forum where we talk about the new songs that have been “leaked” (link to the songs in the thread) and the lame political overtones to the new album.

Three Documentaries I Watched Recently:

• This Film Is Not Yet Rated: Or “Mocking the MPAA’s rating process.” And there’s plenty to mock. It’s a little gimmicky and sanctimonious, but it makes some good points and is pretty entertaining to watch (after all, most of the films that are covered are ones that get the dreaded NC-17, and that generally only happens because of sex scenes). Worth a watch if you’re interested in the subject or you want to see a bunch of uncensored… uh… art…
• Aliens of the Deep: Who wouldn’t love to be James Cameron? The dude makes the biggest movie evar, then decides to take a break from filmmaking for a while and engage in expensive hobbies (and hang out with his brothers) like deep sea diving. He did this before in a movie called Ghosts of the Abyss, where he chronicles an expedition to the Titanic wreck (that film is only so-so, imho). This time around, he brings along a bunch of Nasa scientists who observe the preternaturally weird lifeforms that thrive deep in the ocean where no sunlight reaches and speculate on alien life forms. Take a look at this one:

  

  Zoinks! That thing is amazing. The extended cut of the movie on the DVD is good and worth watching, but it can get a bit slow or meander a bit at times. Still, fascinating stuff.

• Grizzly Man: Werner Herzog’s portrait of grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 years among the grizzlies before they inevitably killed him (and his girlfriend). This movie is creepy on many levels. Treadwell himself would be creepy enough even if we didn’t know what eventually happened to him, but his death looms over the entire film. The worst part is that Treadwell is constantly proclaiming his love for the bears and nature in general, but you can clearly see (even early in the film, long before his death) how absolutely and completely the bears do not reciprocate in any way. Treadwell was clearly aware of the dangers (at least on an intellectual level), and often loudly trumpets them, but he thinks he is somehow exceptional. He thinks he’s been accepted by the bear community because he loves them. It’s almost like a greek tragedy or something. The grand majority of the footage was provided by Treadwell himself, who had compiled nearly 100 hours of footage on the last 5 of his trips to Alaskan bear country. Herzog sifted through all that footage and intercut it with the requisite interviews with family, friends, and experts. It’s quite a good film, though a little disturbing and not all that pleasant. It was actually a little interesting to watch this after watching Aliens of the Deep, as the contrast between people who treat nature with a degree of awe and respect (i.e. people who don’t invite death) and Treadwell, who clearly loves and cherishes nature, but tragically doesn’t respect it…

I like this list day thing. Expect more in the future (not all of which will be book and music related, I promise).