My Bloody Valentine m b v (2013)

living with this, giving it spin after spin to win love, after Loveless had earned it so effortlessly....  I'll never forget cresting Oregon highway 8, Canyon Road, at sunset, headed home, loving that album and its four-chambered, heart-transplant logic. They can't and don't with this, it's a muteness, a fuck-you surrender to time itself, Waterloo in all its mud and cannonfodder.

Sarah Louise DEEPER WOODS (2018)

if this was made in the sixties you would bleed yourself dry to get a clean vinyl, your plasma would lubricate half the bay area, your marrow would feed the rich in service of a sound

Sarah Louise NIGHTTIME BIRDS AND MORNING STARS (2019)

give the allfather a close shave and sweep up the beard as he goes to enjoy the world anew

THE POLKA KING dir. Maya Forbes (2018)

i wish more true crime was in this vein-- so tired of the new american gothic serial killer crap, it is a tremendously callow and crass fad.  give me Jack Black playing well out of his depth, every variety of grifter, white collar crime by blue collar perps.  and give me schwartzman as sidekick all day long.



Do you know any truly honest charismatic people?  does the nature of charisma itself involve airbrushing the details enough, a lack of allegiance to inconvenient facts?  or am i just trying to make lack of charisma commendable?  probably more the latter, but still, anytime someone is trying with gusto to charm a room, my ears are up for slips, fallacies, uncitables.  Nuance is so loathed in America, and that creates opportunities for the all-american con man, the archetypal harvester of the seeds of greed.

THEY'LL LOVE ME WHEN I'M DEAD dir. Morgan Neville (2018)

as fun as a documentary can be, now that the film is made and beautiful, a triumph buried then exhumed, stitched and whole

Bill Evans Trio LIVE IN BUENOS AIRES (1979)

i am bill evans and sazerac years old

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND dir. Orson Welles (2018)

Chin up, Brooksie! They haven't got us yet!

When life's a comedy, it doesn't matter which reel is which.

ROMA dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2018)

Zinnian masterwork, refocusing the locus of a family, making the father an irrelevant fool, the help as the true engine of daily life's slow motion miracles, the accumulation of acts of loves, a bricklayer's magic isn't a trowel or a mortar but in not stopping until the job is done

LEAVE NO TRACE dir. Debra Granik (2018)

the most Oregon film since Sometimes a Great Notion

Marissa Nadler FOR MY CRIMES (2018)

mazzy stoned folk

Mark McGuire KEWL CLOUDSCAPES OF THE FOUR DIRECTIONS VOL. III (2019)

i am a corny af real one and i love you



Nicholas Roerich, Tibet, Himalayas 1933.

DJ Koze KNOCK KNOCK (2018)

the 80's is my favorite decade in music, and I wish it was closer, but it's not, there's no second place, it's a race for third.  that said, this is a glorious little mood-piece homage to the 90's, a beat album with wonderful guests, evoking a world where DJ Shadow and Sonic the Hedgehog ruled Saturday night

Carl Phillips WILD IS THE WIND (2018)

rothko and mondrian in one soul, taking turns with the brush

Blakes Mills LOOK (2018)

clarity is not a nullness

Midwife PRAYER HANDS (2018)

Late hour entry for album of the year, though it be but a 27 minute long EP. (Please Please Me was only 32, so it is within the margin of error for me.) Holy smokes is this terrific, like Grouper's older sister, escaped from the commune to make a High Desert guitar album, it sounds like Eastern Oregon, windswept and brutally gorgeous, a response to the joyful Sahara guitar maestros, a rejoinder from a broken Western world.  In a land that was once underwater and brought forth, to be examined, and submerged again.

William Basinski/Lawrence English SELVA OSCURA (2018)

a prayer for serenity answers itself

Scott's Top Ten Films of 2018

There was a lot of great Scotttent -a clumsy portmanteau- on BP this year, culminating in a top ten that I'm thus far only 2/10 on.  But I am down for any film that puts Isabelle Huppert in a horrible hat!  Unless they do that in GRETA because there is no way in hell I'm seeing GRETA it looks like scariest movie ever made.

FIRST REFORMED dir. Paul Schrader (2018)

Starkly beautiful yet somehow shot in Brooklyn and Queens.

Ethan Hawke's character, Ernst Toller, was named after a German activist playwright who was briefly the president of the unrecognized Bavarian Soviet Republic.  The dialogue is reminiscent of an Arthur Miller play. The politics on ecodespair pretty much align with my own (after college courses rather than internet research) so the final act tends far more towards comedy for me than it seems for most. I have a hunch Schrader, while earnestly intending this as a wake-up call à la mother! he also would like to posit that much male anger and self-righteous violence is the inability to recognize plain old loneliness and try to remedy that first.  Triage your emotional burdens people!  But work backwards, instead of shrapnel out of the lungs, eat a bowl of soup and call your mom. 

THE FAVOURITE dir. Yorgos Lanthimos (2018)

a gorgeous tragedy, a leavened heaviness, pumpernickel topped with caviar and crème fraîche

Favorite Television of 2018

10. Westworld
9. Crashing
8. Barry
7. Killing Eve
6. Silicon Valley

5. Last Week Tonight
4. The Romanoffs
3. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
2. GLOW
1. Atlanta

I definitely have some catching up to do, but this is the year where I officially got over TV and would rather watch a movie nine nights out of ten.

Did anyone out there finish Arrested Development?

ONLY TO SLEEP by Lawrence Osborne (2018)

A very well regarded travel writer and novelist gives Marlowe his last ride, raising him from Baja stupor and setting him on a manhunt for a ghost, only to find a woman worth pursuing through a Mexico of magic and danger. Marlowe was always a masochist, always a chin-first boxer and smartass of the highest order, and when his habits catch up to him, reduce him to a tequila-soaked has-been, we see that he's always been chasing a skirt, but it is one particular skirt, the red one that's always vanishing just around the corner.