apple juice

1. Napoleon Dynamite
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Hero
4. The Incredibles
5. Garden State

Best Older Movie Seen For the First Time: Rushmore

Here it is, my favorite albums of the year:

1. Funeral – The Arcade Fire
2. A Ghost Is Born – Wilco
3. Good News For People Who Love Bad News – Modest Mouse
4. The Grey Album – Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse
5. Med??lla – Bj??rk
6. Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
7. Antics – Interpol
8. Boy In Da Corner – Dizzee Rascal
9. A Grand Don’t Come For Free – The Streets
10. Two Way Monologue – Sondre Lerche

Favorite Song of the Year: Company In My Back – Wilco
Favorite 2003 album discovered in 2004: Give Up – The Postal Service
Best Soundtrack: Garden State
Favorite Concert: The Arcade Fire

(I’m no good at writing these reviews, but here goes…)

I just got back from The Arcade Fire, live at the 400 Bar in Minneapolis, and I thought I would share a few thoughts.

It was an awesome show, living up to the hype that I had heard: The live show was even better than their album.

7 band members took the stage and played with the confidence and energy of a band that knows exactly what they are going to bring, and how to push it further.

If you have the opportunity to see them, I highly recommend it. Look for band members drumming on the walls, the speakers and each other’s heads. Look for the inflatable cow being tossed around. Look for the dancing violin player. Look for all kinds of wacky stuff that happens during the show, and what you’ll see is a band that has a very bright future in front of them, and I look forward to seeing it develop.

You may have heard that a number of ABC stations decided not to show ‘Saving Private Ryan’ on Veterans’ Day this year. Frank Rich of the NYT has written an excellent article dealing with these issues of censorship, the Iraq war, sanitizing the world for the Americans who can’t handle the truth. (You can’t handle the truth!)

What makes the “Ryan” case both chilling and a harbinger of what’s to come is that it isn’t about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast “Saving Private Ryan” also own major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next. If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions’ efforts to present the graphic truth of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that are exercised by Bono and “Saving Private Ryan” are often the same ones who are campaigning to derail any news organization that’s not towing the administration line in lockstep with Fox.

Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished.” During the early weeks of the invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts challenging the administration’s version of events risk being called traitors. As with “Saving Private Ryan,” the aim of the news censors is to bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn’t have an assured triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might undermine its support among the administration’s base. Thus the censors argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine’s shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly “overplayed” by the so-called elite media.

I think it’s become very clear in the last year that there is fundamental disconnect about what people in this country “believe” is happening in the world around us. It is this disconnect of “faith-based” vs. “reality-based” that has created a climate where people will vote for a president who, in my opinion, has recklessly gotten us into a war, and then they don’t want to see the results of it.

Or don’t want to be reminded of the results of past wars. I’m pretty sure Saving Private Ryan was universally praised for it’s accurate depiction of War. Well, we’ve got one going on right now. It’s always your right to tune out, but let’s not block people who want the truth from actually getting the truth.

Fallujah In Pictures

No one is happier than myself about the continued heavy rotation of Hold On by Wilson Philips on our branch’s Muzak system.

Break free, break from the chains…

I have been severly slacking on my posting as of late…

I rode the bus this morning to work. Inspired by the movie that Sonja and I saw over the weekend, Super Size Me.

Super Size Me was an excellent movie. I’ve heard more than once that, “Well, duh! Of course if you eat McDonalds all the time, it will be unhealthy.” He addresses that in the movie. It may seem like common sense, but there is a significant number of people that eat McDonalds (or “fast food”) everyday. I can think of three people off hand that eat it everyday. Ironically enough, those three aren’t overweight. (Don’t know about their general health).

Anyways, about the bus ride. I was inspired, because, although I’ve been running fairly regularily, I could throw in some extra walking and it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

So out to the bus this morning. Lesson 1: I need to learn to read a bus schedule. I missed this first bus by about 2 minutes, and then had to wait 25 minutes for the next one. Luckily, I started off way early this morning so I would be sure to get to work on time, and I got there at 7:50, not too bad.

The bus drops me off on the far side of Southdale from where I work, so it’s about a 6 block walk to work, and it’s 3 blocks from home to the bus stop. So that adds about 2 miles of walking into my day.

In the movie, he quotes a statistic that says the average New Yorker walks 5 miles a day. I thought I could have a bit of the NY lifestyle without all the people and crazyness. So far so good…

We just returned from the movie theatre, and the movie was excellent.

It has further cemented my views on Bush, Oil, Republicans, Iraq and the war. You could say I read a lot, and I think I am fairly well informed, so I was well aware of any trickery that Mr. Moore may have tried to pull. But you know what? All of what you have read has been a bunch of hot air. The video will speak for itself.

Basically, if you vote for Bush, do not tell me. I will have a hard time believing that you are sane. In the meantime leading up to the election, I will do everything I can to convince any repubicans in the house that for once, you must not vote for Bush.