25 Songs I Can’t Live Without

(crossposted from Facebook)

Select the top 25 songs you cannot live without. The ones you can listen to over and over and never get tired of. They don’t have to be in any particular order. These are the songs that make you laugh, cry, or think of an old friend, etc. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If you were tagged, it’s because I’d like to see what you’d put in your list. To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 songs, tag 25 people, then click publish.

I think I could do this and them all be Rilo Kiley songs…but I won’t. But it was tough cutting out the, like, ten other RK songs I wanted to include. But I AM taking the opportunity to post my favorite RK promo shot again.

This is a combination of songs that I just love so much I put them on repeat often, songs that acted as gateway drugs to new styles and areas of music, songs that I grew up with and still love, and songs with lyrics that speak deeply to me. It’s new-centric because I’m fickle and jump from music to music quickly, and because I grew up in classical music and classic-Hollywood home so didn’t get exposure to many of the greats of the ’60s-’80s until the last year or two, so I even though I’m sure that artists like Bob Dylan and Hendrix and others will be on a list like this for me five or ten years from now, I don’t feel comfortable putting them on there now. Explanations of why individual songs appear available upon request. ;)

1. Papillon - Rilo Kiley
2. Pictures of Success - Rilo Kiley
3. Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl - Broken Social Scene
4. Spectacular Views - Rilo Kiley
5. Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
6. Myriad Harbor - The New Pornographers
7. Rock Me Now - Metric
8. Baba O’Riley - The Who
9. Music When the Lights Go Out - The Libertines
10. Brandenburg Concerto 2: III. Allegro - Johann Sebastian Bach
11. Yesterday - The Beatles
12. Deep Red Bells - Neko Case
13. You! Me! Dancing! - Los Campesinos!
14. Acid Tongue - Jenny Lewis
15. Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes
16. Run - Snow Patrol
17. Creep - Radiohead
18. Teenage Riot - Sonic Youth
19. Monster Hospital - Metric
20. So What - Miles Davis
21. Material Girl - Madonna
22. Last Dance - The Raveonettes
23. Peace and Hate - The Submarines
24. For the Actor - Mates of State
25. The Man That Got Away - Judy Garland

Things I Learned, Edition #1

Things I learned within the last week:

• Jumping rope is way harder than it was when I was ten.
• The house where Michael Jackson grew up is a block and a half from my apartment.
• 121 BPM is the perfect speed for a walking playlist.
• If you drag a program to the edge of your screen on a Mac and hold it a second (and you have Spaces enabled), it’ll pop into whichever Space is that direction.

More things I learned later. When I learn them.

25 Things You May or May Not Know About Me

Mostly intended for FriendFeed folks; other people who know me may know quite a few of these things.

1. I always struggle with lists like this, because I’m simultaneously very open and very private - anything I want people to know, they generally do, and anything I don’t, no one does.
2. When I was little, I had an elaborate imaginary world in which I owned a stablefull of hunter jumpers. At one point I went so far as to have a registry book listing all the imaginary horses and their showing and breeding history.
3. I adore making lists. I will turn anything you can think of and find a way to make a list out of it. Even this one I liked once I got going. :)
4. I can name pretty much all of the Academy Awards from 1928 to now for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress - the last few years get a little spotty because I stopped practicing. I could do Foreign Film and Song for a while, but I sort of lost track of those.
5. My name is a combination of my parents names: Jean + Randy = Jandy.
6. I grew up watching only old movies and listening to classical music. I could’ve counted the post-1970s movies I’d seen on one hand until I was about fifteen, and I was sixteen before I bought a current album (Madonna, if you really want to know).
7. I’m really glad for #6, actually - I have a much broader perspective on cinematic and musical history than many of my contemporaries.
8. I have degrees in Communication, Video/Audio Production, and English Literature, and I’m not using any of them in my job.
9. After graduating last May, I moved out to LA pretty much for the heck of it, no job or housing waiting for me (well, I had friends to stay with). It was simultaneously exciting and terrifying.
10. My arms are double-jointed naturally, but since I broke it at age eight, my right one bends backwards at a rather disturbing angle.
11. I first got into the online life through Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom during the show’s final season.
12. My handle/nickname “faithx5” is a mashup of the BtVS character Faith and her signature phrase “5 by 5”.
13. I can’t remember not knowing how to read.
14. The best four months of my life were January-April 2002, which I spent studying abroad in England - it was my first extended time away from home and my first on-campus living experience (I commuted to college). I grew more as a person during that period than any other time in my life.
15. I had two years of French in high school and intensive French for grad school, but a year of Spanish in college. I know both just enough to mix them up nicely.
16. I went down to Juarez, Mexico on mission trips with my church six years in a row during high school and college to help teach English to kids. It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done, and I wish I’d kept up with the people down there better.
17. My ears stop up so badly on plane trips that I often can’t hear (or hear very muffled) for the first day after I land. But I still love plane trips. :)
18. I’ve railed against reality shows for years, and yet I find myself oddly mesmerized by them. Now I shamefacedly watch American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, The Amazing Race, and Survivor, and if it didn’t conflict with other shows, I’d be watching Superstars of Dance. Mock me now.
19. I love starting new projects, but routine maintenance can drive me crazy. (Example: coded a site last month for a client, and now they want a couple more pages added, and I really don’t want to do it because I’m mentally done with the project and never want to see it again.)
20. My idea of happiness is 75 degrees, bright sunshine, cruising on the PCH with the windows down and the volume up.
21. I’ve traveled in every US state except Oregon, Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii, and all the Canadian provinces between Montreal and Vancouver, plus a bunch of Western Europe.
22. I used to collect keychains from every place I went. I need to start that again, you know, when I have time and money to start traveling again.
23. I’ve played the piano for as long as I can remember (a bit out of practice lately). I also played the violin for a while, and I’m trying to pick up the guitar now, but with less dedication than is necessary to actually be successful.
24. I know enough about tech to make non-techies think I’m a super techie, but not enough to fool anyone who actually knows anything about tech.
25. I have yet to experience what I would consider a serious romantic relationship.

Things I Learned Watching Repulsion

• Being a virgin makes you go batshit insane.
• If you see someone carrying loose meat around in their purse, alert the authorities. They’re probably batshit insane.
• A candlestick can double as both a murder weapon AND a home improvement tool for the batshit insane. Sometimes within minutes of each other.
• Keeping a full tub of water at all times can aid with dead body disposal. If you’re batshit insane.
• It would be wise to assess the batshit insaneness of your hot young tenant before you try to come on to her.
• If grasping hands start emerging from your hallway walls, it might be prudent to get out of the house for a while. You’re potentially going batshit insane.
• Batshit insane or not, Catherine Deneuve is frakking gorgeous.

And also, it’s a really good movie - part New Wave, part psychosexual thriller, full of great high-contrast black and white cinematography and Catherine Deneuve looking gorgeous. And being batshit insane.

Academy Award Nominations

via Cinematical

Okay, Benjamin Button got the most nominations? Geez. One of the least interesting major films I’ve seen this year, and it leads the nominations. (My review.) Not that it was actively bad most of the time, but boring. Not up to any of the participants’ best.

Kate Winslet only gets nommed for The Reader - I’ve heard she’s even more impressive in it than in Revolutionary Road, so I guess I’m gonna have to go see it. And Melissa Leo for Frozen River! Nice surprise there. I didn’t see Frozen River, but I heard fantastic things about it and her.

Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road - great supporting turn. He won’t beat Ledger, though, and that’s okay.

Only three nominees for Original Song? That’s not normal, is it? Two of them from Slumdog Millionaire. It would be hilarious (and somewhat awesome) if a Hindi song won an Academy Award.

Overall, a pretty uninteresting year for the Oscars. There were only about seven or eight films in serious running for any category. Has this been a bad film year? Or just bad for Oscar-type films? I’m thinking the second, because most year-end lists I’ve seen are mostly full of foreign and very small indie films.

Made in USA

I liked Made in USA more this time around - having seen it once and read about it some made me more able to pick out what the actual story is. But as I was leaving, it did make me wonder. Do I like Made in USA and forgive its blatant incomprehensibility only because I know it’s a Godard film?

That is, Godard willfully frustrates attempts to figure out the film’s story by leaving out almost all of the narrative queues that would allow us (the audience) to assign causality, motive, or often even temporal order. Would I be okay with this from any other director, or would I take him/her to task for constructing what is basically a detective story with no way to keep track of the criminal events going on? Or would I recognize, even in a director I don’t blindly love the way I do Godard, that all of the incomprehensibility is intentional and go along with it, the way I do for Godard?

Is this a failing, to treat films differently just because of who directed them? (I’m thinking of calling this, in my case at least, the “oh, it’s just Godard, he can do whatever” syndrome.)

Video comments

Not sure how I feel about the whole video comments thing; I may be on the side arguing for the skimming ease of print over the time-consuming nature of video, despite my affinity for things audio-visual. In any case, Disqus just enabled video commenting through Seesmic with a click of a button, so I figured I’d turn it on. What the heck.  It’s not as if anyone ever comments here anyway (probably because most people don’t know it exists, ah well), so I still might not get any data on whether or not I actually like it. :)