One of the better things I’ve ever written is this review of Van Halen’s new album for The Agit Reader.

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The Caretaker returns with a long-in-the-making soundtrack to acclaimed filmmaker Grant Gee’s documentary about German writer WG Sebald. ‘Patience (After Sebald)’ is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss – an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944-2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book ‘The Rings Of Saturn’. The source material for ‘Patience’ was sourced from Franz Schubert’s 1827 piece ‘Winterreise’ and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear.

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If you’re looking for something to light your fire, here’s a decent place to start.

I used to spend a ton of time making big, long lists of my favorite everything – books, music, movies, etc. – and I took great joy in keeping those lists up-to-date. If you poke around on this site, you can find remnants of all that.

Anyway, in 2011, I was passionate about a few things. Here are some of them.

Mickey Newbury
Newbury’s 1969 album, Looks Like Rain is what I listened to more often than not all year. An American Trilogy is actually a set of 3 albums (with a bonus disk) reissued together. I got them on vinyl and they rarely left my turntable. You won’t find much of this on Spotify, otherwise I’d include a link. Here it is at iTunes, though. Get the first track (“Wrote A Song A Song/Angeline”) and if you like that, keep going.

Miles Davis Quintet – Live in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1
This was the greatest band of all time. These live tracks are amazing. I don’t know if this is the record that could convert someone to Miles Davis-ism, (Try In a Silent Way or Files de Kilimanjaro for that.) but it’s one more reason my son would be named Miles Matthew.

James Blake
James Blake put out a handful of EPs and his self-titled LP came out right at the beginning of the year. Of everything that seemed really new to me this year, Blake’s music is what stuck. Some call it dubstep, I call it gospel for the internet generation. (Dude puts on a shockingly good live show, too.)

How to Dress Well continued to amaze me, even after I found out he’s a goofy, Robert Crumb-looking mo/fo. Heck, that might make me respect him even more. You’d be hard pressed to find something more arresting than “Suicide Dream 2 (Orchestral Version).”

Cities Aviv is the best hip-hop music I heard this year, by a long shot. Here’s a link.

I wrote about some other music I liked in 2011 for The Agit Reader.

I do a poor job keeping up with it, but I do update my Goodreads profile on occasion.

I read the Steve Jobs biography really quickly and liked it. It’s not brilliant writing, but Isaacson had an amazing subject.

I loveloveloved Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of the longer entries in the 33 1/3 series. I learned a lot from it about how taste and our measures of high, low, good, and bad culture came about. It’s one of those rare books that had me questioning myself a lot as I read. I love those. Here’s a paragraph – about one of the problems with critiquing music – that I highlighted:

In daily life, music is usually part of other activities, from dancing to housework to sex to gossip to dinner. In critical discourse it’s as if the only action going on when music is playing is the activity of evaluation music. The question becomes, “Is this good music to listen to while you’re making aesthetic judgements?” … Part of the reason for the recent backlash against indie rock, I suspect, is a weariness with how much of it seems to be mainly music to judge music by. Celine Dion, on the other hand, is lousy music to make aesthetic judgements to, but might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.

In case you didn’t get it from the title, this book is about Celine Dion. And it’s brilliant.

Steven Pressfield (“The War of Art”) out out another great, little book. It’s called Do the Work and you shouldn’t read it if you’ve been satisfied with sitting on your ass thus far.

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, was the most fun I had reading fiction, I think. It’s about baseball and college and stuff.

I think I have to agree with Esquire, though, that The Submission, by Amy Waldman, was the best piece of fiction I read this year. It was satisfying in every way. It had a ton of moments that were inevitable but wholly surprising. That’s about the best thing I can say about a book. (If you’re gonna go look for it on Amazon, I apologize for all the smutty pictures you’re about to see. Kinda funny, though, right?)

Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express cookbook came out this year, too, didn’t it? That’s about the best cookbook ever. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s fun, encourages creativity (and actual cooking) and is full of stuff I love to eat.

I read a lot of Manga in the middle of the year. My favorites were Ôoku: The Inner Chambers, by Fumi Yoshinaga (a woman, FYI) and Bakuman, from the people who brought you the world-wide smash Death Note.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Stephen Sondheim’s collections of lyrics (as well as “comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes.) This may be the closest we get to a memoir from The Man, and if you’re involved in any sort of writing I bet you’d really enjoy these. And if you’re involved in any sort of theatre-making, you’d best not to admit to me that you’re not going to read these books. They are AMAZING.

Movies? I didn’t really go to the movies this year. I did get the Criterion Collection release of In the Night of the Hunter, and that’s really worthwhile tribute to a great true classic.

Other that, let me just mention a few other random things: Tomas Transtromer, CM Punk, Shadow of the Colossus, Vanilla Cedarwood, Rajon Rondo, and A Few Acres of Snow.

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There’s something going on with me & Spotify. It has changed my music consumption habits.

If you look at my Spotify, you’ll see a whole bunch of playlists. I really like making playlists, and I find it an effective way to collect music I wanna listen to a lot, as well as music I wanna listen to later. Part of my great frustration in life is my omnivorous interest in cultural content. I’ll read a book about almost anything and I’m interested in almost all music, at least to the extent that I wanna know what it’s about and what it’s for, even if I’m just gonna disregard it thereafter.

So, my iTunes is full of lists of my favorite artists. I’ll take the tame to cull the 30 best At the Drive-In songs into a list, for example, or collect everything Low’s released since The Great Destroyer, to study it all as a whole. I also have a series of playlists labeled “TODAY” with an attached date. Those are just collections of a lot of recent acquisitions that I haven’t wholly absorbed. And I export these playlists so I have these little peeks into what I was interested at any given time in the past few years. For example, “TODAY 7.19.11″ (the most recent one) has 259 songs, including Adele, Austra, the Father’s Children re-issue, an old Pretty Lights mix, and that newer Bon Iver album which I still wasn’t sure I liked.

Anyway … that’s iTunes, where I spend money on albums. (Though I sometimes get them for free thanks to my Agit Reader involvement.) It’s mostly recent music and I’m usually using it to figure out what’s cool among the many new releases demanding attention. And the playlists are very utilitarian.

On Spotify, however, my lists are usually more creative and contain almost entirely old music. I started using Spotify in the Plaza Suite of an airport hotel outside of Chicago (I’m not rich. I just got there late and it’s all they had left.) Thus, my first Spotify playlist is titled “Plaza Suite 7.17.11,” and it’s full of the music I was in the mood for that night. (If you’re interested, you can check it out right here.) In North Carolina, I made one called “Wake Up Megadeth.” Guess what. It’s full of Megadeth songs and I use it sometimes to wake up. “The Clash in 60 Minutes” is meant to give the listener a deep appreciation for the breadth of that’s bands talents – in only 60 minutes. I’ve got a great Dylan list for for non-Dylan fans, but he’s not really on Spotify yet. (Remember Lulu? I plugged the Dylan playlist right into my blog. That was a great service. Apple bought it and supposedly they were going to replicate that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.)

More than that, though, I’ve got lists full of Jazz and classical. I’ve pulled out my favorite recordings of Shostakovich’s quartets to have on-hand at all times. I’ve used Spotify to comb through dozens and dozens of old jazz albums I’d never heard to pick out some gems. That’s harder to do on iTunes, since even the 90 second preview don’t lend themselves to the deeper nuances of deciding which Dexter Gordon tracks are really worth your time. I’ve gained a deeper appreciation of Yusef Lateef, whose output varies greatly in style, clarity, and quality. There’s no way I was going to spend the money necessary to sort through it all on iTunes, but Spotify is a no-risk proposition.

And so I’ve noticed that not only is Spotify really useful in that way, but it also prevents me from (or frees me from) indulging my pretensions to being a well-informed music-snob. Logging into iTunes each week, I’d usually pick out a couple of new releases that seemed to have the potential to become essential. Logging into Spotify, only ask, “What do I want to listen to right now?” Increasingly, what’s new has little to do with it.

(Which is kinda like how I don’t go to the movies anymore. When I stopped worrying about knowing what movies were good or cool or whatever, I lost a lot of interest. I know that says something unfortunate about me. Alas and alack.)

(Which also relates to Chris Brogan’s great post about “Why You’re Not As Successful as You Want To Be.” Hint: stop worrying that you’re going to miss something.)

Of course, as I write this, I’ve got iTunes open and I’m listening to Zola Jesus’s newest, both because it’s great for the coffee shop, and because I need to decide if it’ll be on my top ten list this year. Go figure.

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This video is amazing, and not just cause they’re from Columbus.

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I love this Radio Dept. song, and the little art filmthey made to go with it is great, too. This has been a great year for music, in my humble opinion, and this record makes me feel good all over, but detached, too. I like that.

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I have to turn in my top 10 albums of the year list to the Agit Reader tomorrow, so I’ve been ruminating on some of my favorite records of the year. Here are just a few tracks that have really stuck with me.

[playlist id=2]

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This is a strange thing, a YouTube from DJ Spooky’s set at MoogFest.

In it, you can see me taking pictures of him.

Click through to see the video.

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Here’s the quick and dirty way to do it – a giant Flickr slideshow of some of my pix from the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival.

Included: Robyn, Modest Mouse, LCD Soundsystem, Broken Social Scene, Freddie Gibbs, Big Boi, Raekwon, Liars, El-P, Panda Bear, Titus Andronicus, Girls, Beach House, Sleigh Bells, Major Lazer, Pavement, etc.

And read my wrap-up over at the Agitreader.

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