This room is particularly noteworthy because it is in Cole Hall that I took my first cinema studies class, and this it was in Cole Hall that my love affair with filmmaking began in earnest. I learned about shot selection ad screenwriting and mood and everything else that is awesome about movies, taught by a teacher whose name I can’t remember but she was herself a filmmaker and as passionate about it as the subject deserved. It was in Cole Hall that I saw so many films that have shaped my impressions of filmmaking every since. Annie Hall, where I distinctly remember a long discussion about the long shot of Woody Allen walking down the into the camera discussing anti-semitism (”No, Djew?”). The Killing Fields - haunted to this day by the scene of Sam Waterston walking through the mass graves, enthralled by the idea of the importance of journalism in our daily lives. North By Northwest - walking out with my mouth wide open, convinced I had just seen the best thriller ever made (I was right.) Rope - Easily seduced by Hitchcock’s gag, loving the fact that he had another side than straight thrillers. The Graduate - it holds up for me less well as more time passes, but for a lost wandering soul facing the real world, this was like watching my life unfold at 24 frames a second. Titticut Follies and High School - Again, the films don’t hold up that great now, but the lively discussions that followed only helped to cement a love of documentary in my heart. Meet Me In St. Louis - As a surly punk rocker I had little use for the musical, and I remember being overjoyed when my friend stood up and yelled “JUDY GARLAND DIED ON THE TOILET” before walking out in a huff. OK, she didn’t yell it, she whispered it to me, but my story is better and that’s how I always tell it. It was decades before I finally allowed myself to admit that musicals could be wortwhile (thank you An American In Paris). Citizen Kane - Where I walked out 15 minutes in with one of the most brutal sinus headaches I ever experienced, and never caught back up with it until 15 years later.

It was outside Cole Hall that I got yelled at by a member of the student council for hanging up Naked Raygun fliers on university property. It was in Cole Hall that I first saw the infamous “Yeah, Right” birthday shirts (another story for another time.) It was around Cole Hall that I took my first photographs for my first photography class. Inside Cole Hall I first met a girl I carried a brutal crush on for years afterwards. She was wearing cut off jean shorts with long underwear. I said, “Don’t you look punk rock” and she told me to go fuck myself. Cole Hall was right in the middle of campus, steps away from student union, and because the auditoriums were so huge there were always people gathered around it. Cole 100 and Cole 101.

This is probably why some fucking dickweed chose it as the spot where he was going to unload a shotgun today, killing four people and critically injuring six more. He carried in three guns, dropping them as they emptied before turning the last one on himself. The gunman fired from a stage at the front of the classroom, the stage that sat in front of the screen that opened up new worlds to me. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Thanks for your attention

Myspace links provided where available for easy music previewing if by chance there’s something you’re interested in hearing more of.

10) Akimbo - Navigating The Bronze (Alternative Tentacles)

I’ve been a big fan of these guys ever since I saw them open up for Jello Biafra and The Melvins a couple years ago. Just a good sludgy pounding mess. I’d love to see them play again sometime, they’re a fantastic live band.

Akimbo @ Myspace / Akimbo Homepage

9) Eluvium - Copia (Temporary Residence)

Eluvium is a one-man band project by a guy named Matthew Cooper in Portland. I had never heard of his work before and decided to check it out when I heard he was opening for Explosions In The Sky who I was going to see. The record seemed nice enough, very sort of ambient and calm synth-based music. It was when I saw him play live that this all started to come together for me. He just sat onstage with a guitar and a keyboard and started playing a simple line on his guitar and got it looping. From there, he added another and another, building on the original melody and making it grow. After five minutes what was a nice melody became a dense forest of sound, and after ten it was just a cacophany, almost but not quite formless, then quickly brought back to earth. I loved it, it was a fantastic show and immediately afterwards I bought up half his catalog.

This whole experience doesn’t necessarily come through on Copia, which is the only reason it didn’t place higher, but infused with the experience of seeing the live show the album grew on me a lot more. Even better, his method of producing music gave me some inspiration for things I could do myself (maybe). Eluvium was one of my most pleasurable finds of the year, I wish I had gotten off my ass and gone to see him play with Jesu.

Thankfully Bryan Connolly at iamserio.us obsessively followed Explosions In The Sky and Eluvium all through the Pacific Northwest, taping every show as he went - both video and audio! Thanks to his efforts I can supply you with a sample of the Eluvium live experience in the slick little flash player below. It is 12 minutes long, but listen how it builds and builds. That is one guy with one guitar up there. Pure magic.

“Taken” live at Neumo’s, 05-06-2007

Eluvium @ Myspace / Eluvium homepage

8) Do Make Say Think - You, You’re A History In Rust (Constellation)

Having heard bits and pieces of this Montreal supergroup over the years, this is the first time I’d pulled in a full album of theirs. The popular line says that this is their most accessible effort, which is apparently fine with me because I dig the hell out of it. Largely instrumental, with the exception of the stellar “You A Living.” Jazzy and slightly prog in parts as well. Supposedly a fantastic live act, I missed both their local shows in ‘07. Also wins my vote for album name of the year.

Do Make Say Think @ Myspace / Do Make Say Think homepage

7) Explosions In The Sky - All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone (Temporary Residence)

I read some reviews when this came out that were along the lines of “ho hum, another Explosions In The Sky album, nothing new here.” While this is somewhat (but not completely) true, I love the hell out of their apocalyptic instrumental madness. Their show with Eluvium was the best show I saw all year. For their final song “The Moon Is Down” (my favorite EITS song), their guitarist Munaf Rayani duct taped an ebow to his guitar on the floor so he could play with one hand and bang a tamborine on the stage with the other. It was the best thing ever. As a matter of fact, don’t trust me, you can just watch the whole show on google video thanks again to the efforts of Bryan Connolly, who has also torrented a fully mastered DVD of the show. “The Moon Is Down” starts around 1:03:00.

Explosions In The Sky homepage / Explosions In The Sky @ Myspace / My EITS photos from their show at Neumo’s

6) Wilco - Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)

It’s a pretty great year when Wilco ends up down at number 6. Sky Blue Sky is not their best effort in the world (I far prefer the sparsely produced weirdness of A Ghost Is Born and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) but it’s still a great entry for Wilco. Aside from anything else, Tweedy has assembled a fascinating set of immensely talented musicians to surround him and his songs. In particular, guitarist Nels Cline is mind-bogglingly expressive. At their local show this year, he added his own touch to all their older material, as well as kicking out the new stuff with a fervor. I hope to god their keep him around for a good long while. The same goes for drummer Glen Kotche, who is great in that way where he knows exactly when not to play. Every good drummer has to learn that at some point. Want a sample? Here’s a video of “Side With The Seeds”, originally included in Sky Blue Sky’s bonus DVD. Man, I love that solo. Wilco’s website also has a couple of streaming live shows to enjoy.

Wilco @ Myspace / Wilco homepage / My Wilco photos from their Marymoor Park show

5) Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)

Like Wilco, Spoon did not make the best album of their career. They simply released yet another in a series of excellent efforts. I think I had the first half of this CD on auto-repeat for three or four weeks after I bought it. I was particularly taken by “The Ghost Of You Lingers”, a total departure from their usual soul-infused bounciness. The video is pretty mesmerizing. I was less impressed with Spoon live. They put on a great tight show, but it was not like they added a lot over the experience of listening to their albums. The hundreds of wide-eyed high school girls in the audience ate it up though. Afterwards I remarked to a co-worker that maybe its time they rename themselves Swoon.

Spoon @ Myspace / Spoon homepage / My Spoon photos from their show at Showbox

4) Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)

I have no explanation, an album that I should by all rights just hate. Bouncy over-produced pop music, I have absolutely no idea why I love this album so much. It may just be the audacity of the band that I admire. Certainly they are being nobody other than exactly who they like. No idea, but my love for Hissing Fauna is undeniable. Feel free to shun me.

Of Montreal @ Myspace / Of Montreal homepage

3) LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver (DFA)

There is a forum posting I read a while back wherein Mike D’Angelo is taken to task for seeming to take perverse pleasure in tearing movies down. Mike jumps into the fray and says the following (amongst other things, please read the complete thing for more context):

“Outright raves I find immensely challenging—the more I love a movie, it seems, the less analytical and coherent I become, to the point where with something like Irma Vep basically all I can manage is to point at the screen and drool a little.”

I suspect I will have the same problem with these last three records, none of which would surprise me if they landed on my top ten of the decade, much less the year.

No record filled me with joy as consistently as did this one. Prior to this year I had never heard any of the works of James Murphy, and I obtained Sound Of Silver when it leaked on a lark. As with Of Montreal, I was completely taken aback by my love for this record. In retrospect it shouldn’t have been so surprising. Many of my very favorite artists (Gang Of Four, Fugazi) have melded dance beats and funk rhythms with punk rock to create a potent blend of ass-shaking and fist-waving. LCD Soundsystem does the same thing, but instead of punk he takes modern dance moves and combines them with an almost singer-songwriterly dose of indie-rock introspection.

This is why a hundred thousand blogs have declared “All Of My Friends” as single of the year based on its manic energy and mournful lyrics about getting old and getting by. It is hard to argue with their judgment. The song is a masterpieces that ramps up and never stops. However for some reason “Us v Them” was the song on Sound Of Silver that really blew my mind. Man that thing just sticks in my craw for days whenever I hear it. Then again there is “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down,” a song which perfectly describes the my feelings at the moment I left Chicago.

So much of the music I love is dreadfully serious and filled with angst and grief. For me to find an album like Sounds Of Silver that just fills me with feeling great is a rarity, and it’s something I should seek out more often. Too bad the Go! Team dropped the ball this year or it could have been a total disco party.

Argh I just listened to “All My Friends” and it makes me think I under-rated this. These top three may as well be tied for all intents and purposes.

2) Radiohead - In Rainbows (no label)

Radiohead in the top 3 was pretty much a gimme. I’m a huge fan of every record they’ve put out, and there was no reason to think this would be any different. So much has been written about their grand distribution experiment that I see no reason to comment. I paid $10, but haven’t bought the physical CD (although I probably will.)

In Rainbows is really another step out from where Hail To The Thief left off in a lot of ways. More sparse, less produced. More fluid, less practiced. You can feel that this is now a band very comfortable in their skin, and the album feels really organic and fresh. It is quite possible that this is my favorite of all of Radiohead’s records, while I feel I have the least to say about it, which is weird but there you go. That’s why I pasted the quote. That’s also why I am not a pro critic, I mean, just read these descriptions. They’re horrible.

Radiohead played a live webcast of In Rainbows on New Year’s Day, which is currently available via webstream. It’s a great taste of the album for anyone who has yet to hear it. It just made me ache to see them live even more.

“Bodysnatchers” from the Scotch Mist broadcast

Radiohead @ Myspace / Radiohead homepage

1) Low - Drums And Guns (Sub Pop)

Finally we are here. It will surprise zero of the people who know me to find Low at the top. They are one of my most long-lived favorites, I fell in love with them from the first time I saw them play back in 1994. I was originally somewhat unimpressed with Drums And Guns. I was perhaps overly focused on the electronic backgrounds of songs like “Hatchet” and “Breaker” which left me cold. As happens so many times, it was a live set that really brought the whole package home for me. In this case it was via NPR’s All Songs Considered program, which featured Low in one of their webcasts. The show is a jaw-dropper. Most of Drums And Guns is represented, but it is stripped of almost everything, slowed down even farther, and performed with jagged intensity. Given this backdrop I returned to the album and all of its mysteries opened up to me. Seeing them do it all live was even better. They opened with their 20 minute epic “Do You Know How To Waltz?” and just went through song after song, Alan Parker clenched like a raw nerve the whole time.

I will never get people who call Low a “pretty” band. Their music is totally desolate. Even their nicer sounding songs are filled with angst and yearning and fear. Man, they are great. Certainly one of my very favorite bands of the last 10-15 years. Never disappointing.

“Take Your Time” live at 9:30 Club, 11-16-2007

Low @ Myspace / Low homepage

That’s all folks! Hope it wasn’t too annoying, and maybe you’ll even find something you like! 2008 looks like it has some good stuff already. Loving the new Destroyer! <3

On Wednesday my co-worker Gary Love and I gave a presentation to the Seattle Drupal User’s Group. Drupal is an open source content management system, which I have been working with for the last year or so. It is a pretty amazing piece of software. Any one of you could, with maybe half an hour of help, have a very functional website running for your organization using Drupal. This would include blogging and news items, photo upload and galleries, forums, user profiles, custom content types, page creation, etc etc etc. I am currently in the process of setting up a Drupal site for a pinball/video game show that was fully functional in a couple hours with no custom code written. It didn’t look pretty (that still takes some time and effort) but it worked. This is, in my mind, pretty fucking amazing. It is just one more step to democratizing the internet, lowering the barrier to entry for non-profits and community organizations so they can get as much done as any larger player.

Gary is the senior producer for NWsource.com and he’s pretty sort of amazing. He really “gets” the internet and the online space, especially as it relates to media. When he got hired we immediately hit it off. At one of our first meetings, we sat down on the couches in front of this window and he asked me to tell him about how our site is built on a day to day basis. I won’t go into the details here, but Gary recognized that we needed an over-arching system to build our site with. He always talks about “the weave” - the ways in which disparate pieces of data meet and intertwine. If you don’t have a central system to manage that data with, then all you’ve got is a bunch of articles and information that don’t relate to each other in any way. This is bad.

So we began evaluating many different content management systems, eventually settling on Drupal. Then it was up to me and our designer Sean Carberry to get the thing up and running. There were a wide variety of complications, frustrations, and heartbreak involved in this but our phased rollout began last September and things are finally cruising along pretty smoothly at this point. If anyone is really interested in the dirty details about this, I’ll be writing a case study for the Drupal website soon and I’ll link to it when it goes live. Suffice it to say, I learned A LOT in this experience. I really had to stretch myself and learn to think about things in different ways.

One of the things that attracted us to Drupal is the community behind it. These people are REALLY passionate about building it, and espcially passionate about building it properly. They see Drupal as potentially world-changing in all the best possible ways. They are also really really smart, and Drupal is an amazingly well-architected piece of software. As representatives of one of the larger organizations currently running Drupal (although not the largest by far, for instance Drupal also powers The Onion AV Club) we wanted to reach out to this community and contribute back to it. This is how open source software grows, you take and you give. It’s very idealistic and frankly its amazing that it works at all but it does. Not always well or without drama, but it does work.

So I had gone to a couple meetings of the Seattle Drupal User’s Group and at the last one I asked if they would be interested in hearing a presentation about our implementation. They were very enthusiastic about this idea, so we invited everyone into the big auditorium at work and talked about what we did. It went really well. The audience was engaged and interested, and I think I managed to not make a complete ass of myself. There is a video of the talk being edited for later posting, so I guess everyone will have their chance to judge that soon. Mostly though, it was just great to connect with people and share some of the knowledge I picked up while working on the project. I have always loved working on things the general public uses. When I was in college I booked shows and it was the BEST feeling watching 500 people having a blast because of the work you did. Pinball was the same thing, I still love watching people play the games I worked on, or even just seeing them sitting out on location.

I still like that aspect of working on websites, working on something people use. However there is a level of indirection there that kind of sucks. People use it, but much of the time you never really know anything about it, or what they think, or if they just ended up there by accident, or whatever. One of my main reasons for starting this blog in the first place was to build a place where I could discuss movies with other like-minded folk. It worked too, I met a small group of like-minded cinephiles and oddly enough now most of us live in Seattle (hi Scott, Chris and Kent.)

That is why this presentation was so enjoyable. The interaction was much more direct. Everyone got something out of it and it felt really good to do. As a matter of fact, it really boosted my self-confidence on the Drupal front and I’m now pondering submitting one or two presentation ideas to Drupalcon 2008, which is the North American Drupal convention being held in Boston in March. This is assuming I can actually go, which is somewhat in question.

Now if I could just get one of my patches committed I could die happy.

Veggie Veggie is a Thai place on the The Ave in the U-District. It is all vegetarian, and most dishes have an option of being prepared with fake beef, chicken, or fish. I really like having the fake meat options, rather than just all tofu. We’ve been here a few times and it is pretty good but not fabulous. One nice thing about it is the place is rarely crowded, and I’ve never had to wait to be seated. Contrast this with Thai Tom a few doors down which is way better but always completely packed with a line out the door. Choose your poison I suppose.

This trip I got the Cashew Nut stir fry, which was pretty tasty. This is the best dish I’ve gotten here, I’m pretty sure I’ve had their Pad Thai previously and was less than impresed. Roya always getsSen Me Pla, which involves slices of fake fish on a bed of very thin noodles. Service is good and prices are reasonable. If you’re in the area it is certainly worth checking out.

Veggie Veggie on Yelp / Veggie Veggie on Happy Cow

• Blog 50 Times - Easily once a week I think of something that would be interesting to write about, or an opinion / thought I would like to share. I have already started passing the shorter of these off to Twitter, but I should stop being lazy about the longer ones. I also have an idea for a set of themed posts I’m going to try and start. As an experiment I started writing this blog post on my iPhone on the bus which was not as successful as I had hoped, but it leads to…
• Stop Driving To Work - I spent most of last year driving to work, and paying for parking there. This is such a waste and it needs to stop. So I figured out my bus schedule and I’m now busing to work. Hopefully this will return to biking when the weather turns. One nice thing about the bus is that I’m actually reading again which leads to…
• Read 10 Books - Looking at this goal written down seems really pathetic, but there it is. I read 0 books in 2007 (although I finished one I started in 2006) which is just sad considering I’ve always been a very active reader. The internet has had a strong hand in killing that habit, especially the endless supply of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. I’ve really begun trimming that shit down to stuff that is actively useful and interesting.
• Write Some Code For Fun - I enjoy writing software. It’s cool and interesting and I love solving real world problems through technology. In the last few years though, I have written very little software for fun, something I used to do with reasonable regularity. So I need a new coding project that will be useful and fun and push my boundaries a bit. I have a project I’ve been sitting on for a long time that I might dig out.
• Get The Darkroom Set Back Up - While digital photography has become completely mainstream, I am taking a step backward and getting my hands dirty in the chemicals again. I have not printed a picture in over ten years. This is an activity that I loved, but it was also a source of great relaxation and calmness. I miss it a lot, and with our basement there’s no reason not to bring it back.
• See 20 New Release Movies In The Theatre - Last year I saw so few new release films on the big screen. I did slightly better with rep stuff, but the fact is that outside of SIFF I only saw like 20 movies total in any format. I need to get out more, and this year I felt a little disconnected with the current film scene whatever it might be. This may actually be the hardest goal to acheive, but we shall see. I wouldn’t say my love of film has dimmed, but my overwhelming passion for it probably has. The SIFF slog last year, which was brutally mediocre, didn’t help matters one bit I imagine, but I also have other interests crowding around taking up my brain.

I listened to a decently sized pile of new release records this year which I also want to keep up. I have started creating my new ‘08 lists on Listology, and updated the ‘07 ones that I had slacked off on.

So that’s it. Coming soon - 2007 Music Top Ten list (there’s no movie top ten because I don’t think I saw enough to justify it.) Also possibly yet another site redesign.

I was thinking about what to say about Tsai Ming-Liang’s new film I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone when I discovered this review by Scott Tobias over at The Onion AVClub, which says everything I was thinking better than I could have. Thanks for saving me the trouble Scott.

Of course this also prevents me from writing about the only moderately good movie I saw today, and leaves me writing about two of the worst ones I saw in the entire festival.

1. Naked Raygun
2. Bad Religion*
3. Big Black
4. My Bloody Valentine*
5. Sonic Youth*
6. R.E.M.
7. The Stooges (circa 2005)*
8. Sigur Ros
9. The Ramones
10. Gang of Four*
11. Tar*
12. Mission of Burma*
13. Firehose*
14. The Jesus Lizard
15. The Boredoms
16. Dinosaur Jr.*
17. Replacements**
18. Bedhead
19. The Ex
20. Slint*
21. The Police*
22. Rush*
23. Fugazi**
24. Wilco
25. David Bowie

Secondly I bought an iPhone the other day, scientifically proving I have more money than sense. The thing is fucking cool. Anyone who lives near an Apple Store should go check one out, they have about a dozen of them out to play with. You can even make calls on them! I discovered I can even write blog posts on it through the Wordpress interface, which I will probably try as soon as I get a little more used to the keyboard.

Finally congratulations to roya on the completion of her documentary The Seattle Freeze which you can view on YouTube! The film has been getting some press on the local blogs Metroblogging Seattle and Seattlest.

That’s really it. More posting soon!

Sadly the film could not carry its momentum into the second half. The unplanned intermission didn’t help things, but even without it I’m sure I would have felt that things went downhill as the film coasts into a more traditional drama. It is decent (if overly long) and well done, but after that first thrilling hour I was pretty disappointed. Then after the movie faded to black, some titles came on discussing how many nuclear plants there are still operating in Europe and I realized that this was actually an anti-nuclear-power scribe, which actively irritated me. What is worse? A promising movie that heads South or a movie that is consistently crappy? I guess consistently crappy is still worse, but I do hate those films that plunge off the cliff.

After this it was over to The Egyptian to see Still Alive: A Film About Krzysztof Kieslowski which I was really looking forward to, seeing as how I am a big fan of the man’s work. Sadly this was another boring and unilluminating telling of facts, with little of any serious interest. Hey you know what? Kieslowski made some movies! They were really good! He’s dead now! There you don’t have to go see this. On the up side, I did get to spend some time reflecting on a man whose films were vital to my transformation into film nerdism, which is cool.

It was also around this time that I realized something else and my movie watching. If you look at my listology lists of films seen, they are marked with how they are viewed (on film / video, at home / at the theatre.) 90% of them are in the theatre. During this screening I realized I am not just a fan of film, but there is something about the ritual of going out to the movies that actively enthralls me. Seeing a film in public with other people is like comfort food for me. When the time comes that the experience is no longer available I would not be surprised to see my interest in film fall away … not completely … but significantly. It just wouldn’t be the same anymore.

Thank you to the movie theatres of my life, I love you all.