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Largehearted Boy has a roundup of lists of best music of the 2000s.  I don’t think I can write about all these lists as they come out and to be sure just about every publication will have one, irregardless if the decade actually ends in 2010 and began in 2001.

There list is very, very, lilly white, and hence easily debatable.  But it’s a much more interesting list of records than say, Pitchfork’s or Uncut’s lists for the best albums of the decade.  I’m glad I can count on Paste Magazine to thow in some underrated favorites from The Jayhawk’s, Loretta Lynn, Gentleman Jesse, Drive By Truckers, Over the Rhine, The Avett Brothers, and Gillian Welch. 

Also: Paste’s Top 50 Movies of the Decade is worth a gander just so you can argue with yourself over the inclusion/placement of certain movies.

Martin Scorcese shares his 11 favorite horror movies.  There are some nice surprises, meaning movies I’ve never heard of or had forgotten about, or have yet to see.  The one I’m most intrigued by is Isle of the Dead, about a plague that ravishes a small Greek island.

Terry Gilliam runs down his 50 favorite animated films for Time Out London.  Okay, I didn’t read this close enough.  Gilliam didn’t pick out the list at all, he merely provided comments on several of the movies.  As lists of animated movies go, however, it’s a pretty diverse one.  I mean, c’mon, they included Transformers: The Movie for pete’s sake.

 Pitchfork finished up their countdown of the Top 200 Albums of the Decade last Friday.  There are some great picks, some albums I’ve forgotten about, and really very few surprises both in content and in ordering.

What is disappointing is that the music publication managed to ruin their 2009 Best Albums list that will eventually be published at year’s end.  Given how high Animal Collective’s Meriweather Post Pavillion, Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest, and Dirty Projectors’s Bitte Orca placed on the list those are your top three albums in that order for 2009.

When does a President have time to read?!?  Honestly.  Does he have his assistants read the books and give him notes on them? Or does he just not sleep.

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York’s Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

The thing is, the McCullough and Friedman books, were ones I assumed people bought but never read.  The look nice on a coffee table or on a shelf. 

The two crime thrillers are excellent calls (coincidentally, both were writers for HBO’s The Wire).  And I’ve never heard of the last one.

Pitchfork has finished off their list of The Top 500 Tracks of the past decade (assuming, of course, they are referring to the cultural decade “the aughts” and not using a calendar decade — their list begins a year early and ends a year early) 

#1? An interesting choice: “B.O.B.,” Outkast.  It wouldn’t be eligible for my decade list since the song is from 2000, but they make a good case for it, regardless.

We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords (”Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS”), personal anecdotes (”Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo”) and product placements (”Yo quiero Taco Bell”) that read like the world’s first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover’s re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black).

Reading is a personal endeavor.  It’s not a competition; when I engage with a story, I want it to somehow illuminate the dark corners of my world.  I want it to shine a light or reveal a path, give me something that pertains to my struggles and everyday ennui.  I want it to educate me, to make me feel as though I understand the world slightly more than I did before.

Plenty of sites attempt this with their best-of currations.  And while I get the need for those types of list, many of those books always seem dated, past their relevance; the usual “greatest books of all-time” lists (whatever that means anyways) always includes the likes of The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Lolita, et. al. but they always seems daunting and impersonal.  A little too samey.

 ”The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is,” Newsweek says in their just published Fifty Books for Our Times. “What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books — new or old, fiction or nonfiction — open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways.”

Among the selected books are Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, William Faulkner’s The Bear, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live, Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,  Don DeLillo’s Underworld. 

The list is an intriguing mix of fiction and non-fiction and don’t hew to any particular time frame.  The common themes running throughout seem to be that of terrorism and war in the Middle East, financial uncertainty, environmentalism and food, social change, and science vs. religion. 

It’s an extremely thoughtful and well-thought out list.  Many of these books, I haven’t read but I feel as though I must to have a clearer understanding of the world around me.

Don’t want to ruin the surprise, but you’ll never guess what his number one movie is. No really, you’ll never guess because until seeing this interview I had never heard of the movie. Not that I’ve heard of every movie that’s ever existed, but ya know. I’ve heard of a movie or two.

Variety polled members of the Television Critics Association for their picks for the best TV of the past decade. Here are their choices for drama series and comedy series:

Drama: Friday Night Lights, Lost, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire.

Comedy: 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office.

One thing that strikes me about both lists are not only the obviousness of them (exception being Everybody Loves Raymond), but how even in television polling there’s a heightened dose of recentism.  Did I just make up that word?

I suppose I expect that with the sitcoms.  Only in the past five years have the sitcom as an artform come back into it’s own, after perhaps 30 years of slumber.  Networks are pushing the possibilities of what a sitcom can be — moving beyond the sexy housewife as nagging entity to the schlubby and affable working class husband.

But the past decade has been a golden age for the televised drama.  There have been more good dramas on television than ever before.  I’m surprised that Six Feet Under didn’t make the cut or even Battlestar Galactica, despite it’s turgid final few seasons.

And that’s not even beginning to scratch the surface of dramas that should and could have made the list.  Any others?

Last night, Entertainment Weekly unveiled a list of the  50 Greatest Active Film Directors working in Hollywood. 

And you can imagine they only included the best of the best.  The shining stars, the real auteurs like Jon Favreau, Zack Snyder, Judd Apatow (he’s only directed two movies!) and Mel Gibson. 

Yes, as others have pointed out, it’s a pretty terrible list.  Among the directors not included or included but far too down the list are Woody Allen, Gus Van Sant, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, women directors, foreign directors, animation directors and ones that are actually good.  Okay, so that last bit is a stretch as there are ample examples herewithin. 

It’s possible the numeric order of the directors doesn’t actually matter, it’s just there for posterity and not for ranking.  Still.

I used to find myself in a lot conversations that went something like this:

Friend: “Have you ever seen that movie?”
Me: “No.”
Friend: “What about this one?”
Me: “No.”
Friend: “Oh.” (silence)

In an effort to diversify my lack of movie knowledge, I reached out to my buddies who I believe have good heads on their shoulders and asked for help.

I wanted them to name 5 movies they thought I should see. The didn’t necessarily have to be  favorites, but they certainly could be. I promised to watch every one that was suggested to me (limit 5 per person) up to 100. The only requirements were two: 5 movies only & don’t give me crap to watch.

The process created dozens of great conversations with friends, and has provided me with insight into who my friends are, what they like to watch, and potential for more of that when I finally watch the movies. It’s been a great process so far, and I’m just delving into the list.  Here it is, in no particular order:

1. The Lion in Winter
2. Becket
3. A Man for all Seasons
4. The Night of the Hunter
5. The Innocents
6. Female Trouble
7. Killing of a chinese bookie
8. A ma souer
9. Waking Life
10. DoubleTrouble
11. Into The Wild
12. The Prestige
13. The Big Lebowski
14. Casino
15. Breaking Away
16. Lust Caution
17. Angels in America
18. Sweet Land
19. Tsotsi
20. Chinatown
21. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
22. Sophie Scholl
23. Blazing Saddles
24. Primal Fear
25. Braveheart
26. Trainspotting
27. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and
28. The Sting
29. About a Boy
30. Gangs of New York
31. Babel
32. Good Bye Lenin
33. Death at Funeral
34. Pan’s Labyrinth
35. Wild Strawberries
36. The Naked Prey
37. You Me and Everyone We Know
38. Hang ‘em High
39. Unforgiven
40. The Outlaw Josey Wales
41. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
42. Pale Rider
43. Idiocracy
44. The Red Violin
45. The Road Home
46. City of God
47. Sweet and Low Down
48. I Heart Huckabees
49. Playtime
50. Decalogue
51. Touch of Evil
52. Jules and Jim
53. Barry Lyndon
54. Ratcatcher
55. Down by Law
56. In the Mood for Love
57. Cache
58. Two Lane Blacktop
59. Le Cercle Rouge
60. Oceans 11
61. Eagle Eye
62. The Devil Wears Prada
63. Transformers
64. The Golden Compass
65. Swingers
66. Amelie
67. Rebel without a Cause
68. Rear Window
69. Beetlejuice
70. The Last Waltz
71. Paul Simon Graceland Live
72. Donnie Darko
73. Mask and Anonymous
74. The 400 Blows
75. Casablanca
76. Treasure of Sierra Madre
77. Local Hero
78. The Third Man
79. Children of Men
80. Habla con Ella
81. Annie Hall
82. History of Violence
83. American Pop
84. The Jerk
85. Dr. Strangelove
86. Big Trouble in Little China
87. Band of Outsiders
88. The Illusionist
89. Brazil
90. Bottle Rocket
91. Wet Hot American Summer
92. End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
93. Fishing with John
94. 3:10 to Yuma
95. Never Ending Story
96. El Labirinto del Fauno
97. Vicky Christina Barcelona
98. Lonesome Dove
99. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
100. Dan in Real Life

So what are your five movie recommendations?

Phsaw, Minneapolis and Seattle, which were ranked #1 by USA Today of the countries most literate cities with a population over 250,000.  Portland cracked the top ten but was tied with Cincinnati (?).

The top ten are: 1. Minneapolis and Seattle (tie); 3. Washington, D.C.; 4. St. Paul; 5. San Francisco; 6. Atlanta; 7. Denver; 8. Boston; 9. St. Louis; 10. Cincinnati and Portland, Ore. (tie).

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this list bunk, but I will say that for the past six years Seattle and Minneapolis have traded spots at the top.  So why not just include Minneapolis and St. Paul together (they are afterall the twin cities) and give them the stranglehold at the top spot for good.  Also, I fail to believe that St. Louis and Cincinnati actually make this list.

“The study does not look at reading test scores or how often people read, but what kinds of literary resources are available and used. This is “one critical index of our nation’s well-being,” says study author Jack Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn.

The six criteria used included newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.

Not sure what else Portland could be doing to increase their ranking, we’re pretty literate around these parts.  Don’t believe me?  Just ask Colin Meloy.

I always thought Portland’s city slogan should have been “Literate as fuck!”