Top Songs 2013, the third annual list of top songs of the year, to date is my most listened to Top Songs list. 2013 is not blessed with a lot of songs that jump out as epic, but nearly to a song I’ll listen to them whenever they come on.
2014 movie-wise was a year of extremes. The good movies were amazing (12 Years a Slave, The Lego Movie, Snowpiercer) and the bad ones were horrible (300: Rise of an Empire, Riddick, Peabody and Sherman). Even the ok ones tended closer to the extremes than the bland middle.
Yet amazing or horrible we must all agree Everything is Awesome!!! […]
Top Songs 2014. The fourth annual listing of top music for the year. Not strictly ranked, warming to the faint of heart, and oxford comma approved.
YouTube playlist:
Or Spotify if that’s your preference (not complete). […]
The now annual books of the year list takes its third bow next week. The impetus for tracking what I read each year — other than inspiration, accountability, and memory — started as a bonus list tacked onto the end of the Movies 2014 list. Books 2014 was just a list, yet I am expanding it for this #TBT to provide what I remember of these books.
A memory test three years later, here are the books I read…in 2014. […]
A. O. Scott, the venerable, initialed movie reviewer and societal critic for the New York Times, wrote an article a few years ago on a disease he saw plaguing movies entitled “Open Wide: Spoon-fed Cinema.” Scott’s diagnosis: “Forty is the new dead” for cinema as mass infantilization engenders profit at the box office, while stealing profit from culture and the soul. I have thought a lot about this article off and on since its 2009 printing. Initially, I agreed Scott’s diagnosis was a chronic condition of Hollywood. Now I believe it to be a seasonal affliction. […]
It was a year of comebacks. The Avengers! Mission: Impossible! Mad Max (concussion inducing level of exclamation marks)!!!! And, of course, the highest grossing domestic film of all-time (sans inflation): Star Wars. What’s great is that almost everything was good. Almost. […]
The books I read in 2015 spanned new genres. Drama and Graphic Novels (i.e. Comic Books) came in heavy rotation. The most satisfying moments were the phrases and sentences that encapsulated a simple emotion. Emmaus, Equivocation and Peace Like a River contained many.
Simple Inspiration on how to achieve your reading goals this year. […]
The fifth annual listing of top music for the year. Categorized more than ranked, pop music heavy because I’m busy, likely missing something profound, but full of good times.
A full accounting YouTube Playlist.
[…]
Skyfall, the 23rd official Bond Film, has opened to the typical Bond fanfare, but also continues the attempt of the Daniel Craig era to create serious film-as-art. While Skyfall’s predecessors Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace took the serious rather than campy route as well, Skyfall surpasses them as art. This is largely because of of an Academy Award winning Director – Sam Mendes – and another star laden cast, but mostly Skyfall achieves this status because it prominently features and uses artwork to advance the plot. Paintings, the oldest visual medium, are used to heroic effect in Skyfall and frame Skyfall AS art. […]
Whenever anyone says they are anti-vaccination the first image I think of is this one:
The photo is reductionist, of course, but it’s also powerful. Powerful because it encapsulates the current anti-vaccine debate: Vaccines cure and prevent deadly and debilitating diseases and yet are viewed as an olde tymey relic. For pro-vaccine advocates vaccination’s benefits are established history and to argue otherwise is as incomprehensible as arguing against the Holocaust. For anti-vaccine advocates there’s a mountain of “evidence” and the wisdom of mothers and fathers with first-hand “experience” and “logical” caution.
I use quotation marks, because I am pro-vaccination; this post is in defense of vaccination: a scientific, humanitarian, and moral position. […]
