Favorite Things

So I may not be Oprah, and I may not be able to give you a car, or mixing bowls, or other really mediocre crap that no one cares about until there's a big sticker that says "Oprah" on it, but I can give you a list of the things that have brought me joy, happiness, pleasure and laughter this year. Some are material, some are musical, some are mythical and others are mindless, but they are all uniformly great and I hope you enjoy them this holiday and New Year as much as I have in the past months. 

Music*:

"New Romantic" by Laura Marling:
The most sublime cure to the late-night study blues. Marling's introspective, self-deprecating, and charmingly downtrodden lyrics are the perfect complement to her sweetly melancholic voice and smooth guitar. "New Romantic" has kept me afloat on those many nights where midnight came and went while I was up to my eyes in notes, books, remorse and abject frustration.

"Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" by First Aid Kit (Cover of Fleet Foxes):

I kind of hate the original version of this song. The guy who sings it is pretty dreadful. But these two girls, collectively known as First Aid Kit, make the beauty of the song abundantly apparent. It's a cover I've listened to God knows how many times at this point, and I've yet to get sick of it.

"Too Sober to Sleep" by Justin Rutledge:

I won't lie- I basically wish I was Justin Rutledge. His newest album Man Descending is fantastic (and partially inspired the name of this blog), he writes the songs that I can only dream about writing, and he's about the only person who's ever made me say "God I wish I could hurt this bad. Maybe then I'll be able to play music like that." Maybe not such a great goal, but nonetheless, "Too Sober to Sleep" is amazing and one of my favorite songs by Justin. I could only find a relatively low-fi version of it on YouTube, but I urge you to buy the song from iTunes- it's on his album No Never Alone. 

"Ace of the Nazarene" by Veda Hille:

This isn't actually my favorite song from Veda's new album This Riot Life, but it's close (and it's the only one on YouTube. Lame excuses FTW). This Riot Life is insane. It's so great. It's unabashedly artsy and challenging and obscure, but is unstoppably pleasurable to listen to. It swings from the manic and the wryly satirical in this song to lush and hymnal on tracks like "Constance." I sincerely hope that you check the album out. 

"La Vie en Rose" by Pomplamoose (Cover of Edith Piaf...duh):

I happened upon this insanely talented duo one night on YouTube (surprise!) while I was dodging studying and papers (double surprise!). They call themselves Pomplamoose, and both their original songs (in particular "Hail Mary"), as well as their covers (see "Gatekeeper") are fantastic. Very high production values combined with a ton of talent makes for very easy viewing- enjoy!

"Now That All My Dreams Have Come True" by Jill Barber

Almost as much as I want to be Justin Rutledge, I want to marry and bear many musically talented children by Jill Barber. This song is taken from her new album Chances, which, frequent readers will be aware, basically sustains me. It's fantastic, charming and so impossibly loveable that your head almost explodes on listening to it. Again, this is a lo-fi live version, and great though it is, the full-orchestration of the album version is 100% required listening. 

Other Favorite Music for the Year: Portishead's Third, Dala's Who Do You Think You Are?, Wendy McNeill's Guide to Hardcore Living, Laura Barret's Natural Science EP, Dan Mangan's Postcards and Daydreaming and Donovan Woods' The Hold Up. 

Reading:

I haven't read too many "new"books this semester, due in large part to existing under a pile of academic articles most of the time. Nevertheless, I will give you a list of the writing (be it fiction, opinion, blog or otherwise) that I have taken solace in over the course of the past year. 

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut:

My absolute favorite book of all time. I just finished re-reading it for about the 7th time, and it still feels like the first. A hilariously unsettling portrait of the future, the end of the world, and how we should behave when the human race is domed to extinction. This book is beautiful, funny, frightening and brutally honest in even its most dishonest moments. Read it!

A Taste of Honey by Shealagh Delaney:

Again, not a new play by any stretch, but one that was new to me when I bought it for an English course this semester. Delaney's examination of domesticity, motherhood and identity in the industrial slums of working class England was a revolutionary work in the post-war period that radically undermined notions of what terms like "family," "mother" and "wife" really meant. Still relevant, still fascinating and always worthy of a read. 

Slate Magazine:

Slate is an online magazine that is blissfully unfocused. Almost like a Sunday paper- filled with trivial information about books, food, life, business and politics- Slate immensely fun and comforting to read. It provides things that other general-interest magazines just don't care about, like a weekly poetry podcast, photo essays on architecture, and (ghasp) a concern for things happening outside of the United States. Slate is just fun, and even if it is just pandering to people who aspire to feel intelligent, it does a damn fine job of it. 

Clarity, 2008: 

Clarity is just about my favorite blog. You can find a link on the right hand side of this page under the heading "Good Folk." I feel sort of creepy and weird reading other people's blogs still, but this one is so wonderful. It follows the author's own experiences, but never gets hung up on internal tumult or becomes a way of airing dirty laundry. The author always finds a way of drawing broad conclusions about how to center yourself in a frantic professional life, even amid the pushes and pulls of home, office, family and friends. Kudos to the author, and I urge you all to take a look. I dare you not to feel better and more centered afterward. 

StopSmiling 

StopSmiling is a quarterly magazine that professes to be for high-minded low lifes and runs a fantastic blog that you can read here. It's great fun, short, and updated frequently. Also, the magazine is pretty great if you don't mind paying a stupid amount of money for a magazine.

Movies:

I have encountered two main problems when it comes to movies so far this year: 1) I have neither cable nor peasant vision, and thus can't even watch re-runs and 2) I have lived this semester as a hermit. It's pathetic. The tragic consequence of both these problems is that I have not watched a single new movie in the last four months, with the exception of the first half of Pulp Fiction which, obviously, is not new. As a result, this section will be comprised of a short list of movies that I think are really great and will make you feel wonderful over your much-deserved winter breaks:

Wall-E: 'Nuff said

Finding Nemo: See above

Irving Berlin's White Christmas: Likely one of my favorite Christmas movies. Mostly because it is basically Irving Berlin's version of Purple Rain. It may be really atrociously long, kind of dull and ultra-hokey, but I never stop being impressed by how great Bing Crosby sang despite being such a bastard in real life. Also, the final number is so over-produced and garishly staged that you can't help but love it. 

A Muppet Christmas Carol: Not even kidding- the funniest and most cheerful Christmas movie I've ever seen, and the only Christmas Eve tradition that's held up in my house. I demand that you watch this movie over the holidays. 

Jingle All The Way: If there's anything more jolly than Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sinbad fighting off cigar-smoking midgets in a warehouse as they battle for possession of a Turbo Man Doll, I haven't seen it. 

Things That We're All Supposed to Say Over Christmas and That I Truly Mean:

Now for the sappy stuff! This year has been one of extreme difficulty and loss for many, many people. Our financial, banking and industrial structures are breaking down, taking with them the stability of old assumptions about energy, labour and resource exploitation. Every day, we hear news of human and social tragedies- the bombings and gun battles in Mumbai, wars that continue to rage in the Middle East and claim the lives of civilians and soldiers alike, the intensification of slum living and extreme poverty in developing nations, human rights abuses in Myanmar, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The list is endless. Yet from somewhere amid this turmoil, tumult and struggle, hope emerges. This year, we have seen the election of the first African-American President of the United States, citizens across Canada participating in political rallies and engaging in debates about democracy, the emergence of truly viable clean technologies, an unprecedented public scrutiny of nations such as China that have been accused of human rights abuses, and numerous other victories in the name of equality, social justice and basic human rights for all. We are not there yet, but we are gaining ground. 

I can't shake the feeling that my generation is maturing in the midst of a truly foundational social shift. For so long we have assumed that cheap energy is effectively unlimited, for so long we have assumed that people living in poverty cannot be helped, for so long we have assumed that racial, social, economic, sexual, gender and political differences are fixed and insoluble. I feel that this is finally starting to change. People are questioning themselves, others, their governments, their technologies, their entire system of reality like never before as old assumptions are shown to be fallacious, reductive, incomplete, unjust. My generation will bring in a new form of social order, not through revolution, not through revolt, but through the constant questioning of truth; by constantly asking ourselves why things are the way they are.

Thus my Christmas/whatever else people want to celebrate wish for anyone who reads this, and to the world at large, is that you seize any chance at education you get, take advantage of any little scrap of knowledge that you can get your hands on, and use it to increase your awareness of the world around you. Use those bits of knowledge that you gather from school, from the news, from magazines, from YouTube, from your parents and friends to critically examine what truth is, what your truth is. Always question, always seek to improve, always seek to change for the better, always believe that there is a stronger, more ethical and more just way of doing things. Only through this constant re-evaluation of our own system of reality can we ever hope to turn the few glimmers of hope amid tragedy into a fully realized beacon of change. Take time this year to question, to hope for change and to believe that we can be better as a community engaged in common struggles. That's my wish for all of you. Merry Christmas, thanks for reading, thanks for thinking, thanks for being. A million times thank you. 

T

*For the record, the new widescreen YouTube format is sweet when viewed on the YouTube pages, but makes embedding significantly more arduous and frustrating. Forgive the wildly fluctuating frame sizes and the possibility of dead links and non-functioning videos. Fingers crossed that the Internet god** is on my side.

**I imagine the Internet God to be something like in that Simpsons episode where they show Vishnu at the centre of the Earth, furiously pressing buttons, pulling levers, cranking cranks, Supermanning Hos (not actually) and making the whole world run properly.