The Best of Project

I am about to embark on a project to define me at age 32. By tracing my favorite music albums, songs, books, movies and who knows what else, I hope to document where I am at and what I am defined by.

I am starting off with albums because music is probably the art form that has defined me more than anything else.

The albums I chose do not reflect what I see as the “best” works or even as my favorites per se. They are the ones that marked me or left an impact on my soul. For example, I chose The Freewheeling Bob Dylan because of a time it brings me back to. I find Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and even more recent works such as Love and Theft and Time out of Mind to be far superior works but some of the tunes, the overall message and the structures of feeling captured in Freewheeling were so apropos of the time when I fell in love Dylan (when I was 24). It captured me at that time. In a similar vein, Kind of Blue is arguably the most “important” Jazz album of all time and it marked me deeply both as a listener and as a musician. (I remember spending hours at night transcribing Miles’ solo on “So What” and Cannonball’s on “All Blues.”) Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way are also really significant to me. But I chose Sketches of Spain (not nearly the album that Kind of Blue or the others are) because it is more representative of my interests in how it captures my passions for both Jazz and Spain, fusing them together into one album. I had some other difficult choices. I have suffered and grown with Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971 (nothing says winter like this album) but Harvest is still the album I am most ready to return to. I chose If I Should Fall from Grace from God even though my favorite Pogues song, “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” is not on it. Sun Ship is my favorite Coltrane album but I had to graduate from Crescent in order to find and appreciate Sun Ship. Abbey Road is the Beatles’ masterpiece but the white album is what shattered my soul.

The order is not definitive but my favorites are more likely to be closer to the top. An honorable mention should go to the Mark Mothersbaugh-infused soundtracks to Wes Anderson’s films (Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, and The Life Aquatic). I wanted to stay true to the concept of an album. I suppose these are albums, too, but because they are compilations of different artists from different time periods, the singularity of an artist’s vision and the portrayal of a time are not quite there.


David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Tom Waits – Mule Variations
Smog- A River Ain’t Too Much to Love
Tears for Fears – Songs from the Big Chair
The Beatles – The Beatles (aka “The white album”)
John Coltrane – Crescent
Miles Davis – Sketches of Spain
João Gilberto – Voz e violão
Joni Mitchell – Blue
Tori Amos- Boys for Pele
Foday Musa Susa /Philip Glass- Music From The Screens
Neil Young – Harvest
The Freewheeling Bob Dylan
Radiohead – Kid A
Grateful Dead – American Beauty
Artur Rubinstein – The Chopin Collection
Johnny Cash – American IV (The Man Comes Around )
Emerson String Quartet plays all 15 Shostakovich String Quartets
Nick Cave – No More Shall We Part
The Pogues – If I Should Fall from Grace with God
Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Kronos Quartet performs Philip Glass
The Smiths – Louder Than Bombs
Songs of Leonard Cohen
Vinicius De Moraes, Toquinho, and Maria Bethânia – En la Fusa
Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy
Favorite opera: Carmen (predictable) followed by Puccini’s Tosca
Favorite Beethoven symphony: the 7th

Songs

The pleasure I find in songs is one that I have looking for that teenage feeling. More than a time, a song captures a moment, a specific feeling one has. They have a sharper effect on us than albums do. Like the difference between a novel and a poem or short story. An album can re-create a phase, an era of my life where I did some significant learning.

I am definitely an album rather than a song guy but paradoxically a lot times I feel like a short story guy instead of a novel guy.

“Take it With Me” – Tom Waits
“Angie” – The Rolling Stones
“Starman” – David Bowie
“Tiny Dancer” – Elton John
“You’re Innocent When You Dream” – Tom Waits
“No More Shall We Part” – Nick Cave
“The Last Time I Saw Richard” – Joni Mitchell
“Star Witness” – Neko Case
“The Only Living Boy in New York” – Simon & Garfunkel
“Red Right Hand” – Nick Cave
“Wild Horses” – The Rolling Stones
“Into My Arms” – Nick Cave
“Rocket Man” – Elton John
“A Pair of Brown Eyes” – The Pogues
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” – Joy Division
“Stir it Up” – Bob Marley
“Willy” – Joni Mitchell
“New Slang” – The Shins
“Israelites” – Desmond Dekker
“Naima” – John Coltrane
“Let the Wind Carry Me” – Joni Mitchell
“Queen Bitch” – David Bowie
“I Am Waiting” – The Rolling Stones

Books

First of all texts in my dissertation (particularly those by Bolaño, Ponte and Loriga) are off-limits. It goes without saying that they have marked me deeply as a person because I have spent every moment of the past year with them.

The Quijote (not a surprise)

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich

Native Son – Richard Wright

Return to the River – Roderick Haig-Brown

Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne

A Thousand Plateaus – Deleuze and Guattari

Romancero gitano – Lorca

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy

Homer’s Odyssey

Ficciones – Borges

Baudelaire - Paris Spleen

The Collected Tales of Edgar Allen Poe

Metamorphosis – Kafka

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Black Boy – Richard Wright

Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami

Keeper of Sheep – Fernando Pessoa

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

Films

Paris, Texas

Rushmore

Wings of Desire

Woman in the Dunes

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Ghostbusters

Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

The Empire Strikes Back

The Big Lebowski

A Clockwork Orange

The Exorcist

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Hobbit (the 1977 animated version)

Patton

The Shining

Paths of Glory

Chinatown

Vertigo

Rosemary’s Baby

Casablanca

Back to the Future

Lolita

Night on Earth

Lulu on the Bridge

Cronenberg’s Crash